On a sun-bleached terrace overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, Andrea Imperiali, a professor of artificial intelligence at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, paused to let the sound of waves fill the silence. He was addressing a masterclass at ‘LaRipartenza, liberi di pensare’, an annual gathering in Maratea, southern Italy, that brings together business leaders, policymakers and intellectuals. Imperiali warned that public debate on AI oscillates between apocalyptic and euphoric narratives, and called for a systemic vision that connects the technology’s professional, cultural, ethical and regulatory dimensions. ‘Too often,’ he said, ‘the discussion tackles this topic in a fragmented way.’

Half a world away, in Buenos Aires, a parallel concern has been taking shape. Eduardo Laens, CEO of the technology firm Varegos and author of Humanware, has been documenting what he calls ‘deskilling’: the gradual erosion of professional abilities as workers delegate reasoning to generative AI. ‘While Human Resources invests fortunes in developing the competencies of the future, the hurried adoption of artificial intelligence is silently eroding those same capacities,’ Laens told Ámbito Financiero. His warning echoes data from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, which projects that 39 per cent of core job skills will change by 2030, with critical thinking, creativity and analytical ability topping the list of most-needed attributes—precisely the faculties that risk atrophy when AI is used as a cognitive crutch.

Yet the relationship between AI and human skill is not solely one of loss. In Canberra, researchers at the Australian National University’s Emotions and Faces Lab have demonstrated that people can be trained to detect AI-generated faces with remarkable accuracy. Rather than hunting for obvious flaws like a sixth finger, participants learned to assess six perceptual qualities—symmetry, proportionality, attractiveness, distinctiveness, expressiveness and memorability. ‘AI-generated faces are often a little too symmetrical,’ explained Dr James Dunn of UNSW Sydney. ‘Real faces usually have small natural asymmetries.’ The study, which showed that high performers could spot a fake almost every time, suggests that human discernment can be deliberately sharpened even as the technology grows more sophisticated.

In the United Arab Emirates, a different kind of response is unfolding among the young. Razan Bashiti, CEO of Injaz UAE, has observed a generation that treats disruption not as a threat but as a prompt to pivot. ‘I regularly watch students get tough feedback on an idea, rework it overnight, and come back stronger the next day,’ she said. ‘That instinct to treat a setback as useful information rather than a stopping point is one of the most encouraging things about this generation.’ Employers and educators in the Gulf state are emphasising durable human skills—judgement, cross-cultural communication, the ability to simplify complexity—that AI cannot replicate. Omar Chihane of ETS noted that English proficiency is becoming more, not less, important as the lingua franca of business and research, precisely because meaningful connection still depends on human clarity and trust.

Beneath these practical debates runs a deeper philosophical current. In Argentina, commentators have invoked Friedrich Hayek’s warning against ‘the fatal arrogance’ of centralised regulation, arguing that the market, not the state, should navigate AI’s disruptions. Pope Leo XIV’s 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, cited in the Argentine press, acknowledged the Church’s limited technical competence while insisting on the need for moral discernment so that technology ‘does not dehumanise society.’ Back on the terrace in Maratea, as the masterclass drew to a close, Imperiali’s call for analysis over slogans hung in the salt-tinged air. The sea, indifferent and ancient, continued its rhythm—a reminder that the most consequential questions about intelligence, artificial or otherwise, are still answered not by machines, but by the humans who gather to debate them.