In every technological revolution, there’s a moment when the barrier between “those who can” and “everyone else” quietly collapses. We’re living through that moment right now.
For the past fifty years, truly harnessing computer technology required speaking the machine’s language. You needed to understand code, or hire someone who did. You needed technical expertise, or access to experts. The power to create was protected by syntax and arcane knowledge.
That era is over.
I’ve spent months writing about what I call the Digital RenAIssance – this fundamental shift where AI doesn’t replace human creativity but amplifies it. Where the question changes from “How do I build this?” to “What do I want to create?” But recently, I realized I’d been illustrating this revolution with big examples: my Dream Weaver app, keynote presentations, sweeping historical parallels.
What I hadn’t shown was something simpler and perhaps more convincing: what AI actually looks like in the quiet, unseen moments of everyday life.
An Hour in the Life of an AI User
Last week, I was struck by how often I turned to AI – not for anything special, yet when I looked back on a random hour on a random afternoon, here’s what happened:
The Battery Charger Mystery: We had a big snow storm coming but I couldn’t get my generator to start. I bought a Battery Tender to charge the battery, but it started blinking alternating red and green lights. In the old days, I’d dig for a manual, squint at tiny text, or spend twenty minutes searching forums full of contradicting advice. Instead, I simply asked: “Is this proper? The battery tender is blinking green and red” and I shared a picture of the device. Within seconds, AI told me this pattern indicates the tender wasn’t making good contact with the battery terminals, so I cleaned them and tried again. Problem solved. Time spent: maybe 45 seconds.
The Eye Prescription Question: I was wondering whether my latest eye prescription warranted the cost of new lenses. I uploaded pictures of my last three years of prescriptions and asked AI to analyze whether my eyes had changed enough to justify the expense. Gemini walked me through the specific changes in sphere, cylinder, and axis measurements for each eye, explained what those changes meant in practical terms, and helped me make an informed decision. No appointment needed for what was essentially a “should I bother?” question.
Financial Planning Clarity: I needed a quick answer about Roth conversion limits. Not a full financial consultation – just a specific number. AI provided the current annual limit, explained the relevant rules, and saved me from either a phone call to my advisor or a rabbit hole of IRS documentation.
Redesigning Dream Weaver: Remember Dream Weaver, the bedtime story app I built entirely through AI collaboration? It needed a landing page refresh. I simply asked for a redesign, and we iterated through options together – no wireframes, no design briefs, no waiting for contractor availability. I’ll share the new design next week, and when you see it you’ll realize how good AI is at web design.
Planning an Alaska Adventure: My wife and I plan to visit our son in Alaska. I asked AI to find flights from Dulles to Anchorage in July or September, prioritizing fewer stops and good seat selection, with a budget of $800 per person including luggage. It came back with specific options, compared trade-offs, and helped us plan around his schedule.
Aurora Photography Settings: When a rare aurora event was going to be visible in Virginia last week, I needed exact camera settings. I told AI what I had (my Sony Alpha 6700 with a Tamron 18-300mm zoom and a Sigma 30mm f/1.4) and asked for the precise settings for both photography and video. I received specific recommendations: which lens to use (the Sigma for its wider aperture), exact ISO, shutter speed, aperture settings, focus techniques, and how to adjust for video. Not generic advice – settings tailored to my actual equipment for that specific situation. No manual required.
The Carpet Cleaner Hunt: Finally, the most mundane request of all: “Find me the best yet least expensive carpet and upholstery cleaner.” Grok compared options, balanced reviews against price points, and helped me make a quick purchasing decision. It also built a price tracker that every day at 4:06 PM sends me an email with current prices and watches for sales on the item I want.
AI Isn’t Just for Developers
Look at that list again. In one hour, AI and I:
- Diagnosed a technical problem
- Made a healthcare-adjacent decision with actual data analysis
- Got specific financial information
- Collaborated on a complex web design project
- Planned detailed travel with multiple constraints
- Received expert-level photography guidance
- Made an informed consumer purchase agent that emails me daily with deals
None of these tasks required me to code anything. None required specialized software. None required appointments, phone calls, or waiting for business hours.
This is what the Digital RenAIssance looks like in practice – not in the dramatic moments when you build an entire app from a paragraph, but in the accumulated minutes of everyday life that used to be filled with friction.
The Shift in Mindset
Here’s what I’ve noticed about myself: I’ve stopped accepting “I don’t know how” as an answer to my own questions. I’ve stopped assuming that getting real information requires an expert appointment. I’ve stopped treating my own curiosity as something that has to wait.
The printing press didn’t just give us books – it gave us the expectation that knowledge should be accessible. The internet didn’t just give us websites – it gave us the assumption that information should be instant.
AI is giving us something equally profound: the expectation that competence can be augmented with the compiled knowledge of every human who came before us. That our own knowledge gaps shouldn’t be permanent barriers. That the friction between “I wonder…” and “I know” can shrink to nearly nothing. We have humans to thank for these inventions, and we can all grow faster because of them.
A Note on Trust and Verification
I’m not suggesting AI is always right. It isn’t. For my eye prescription question, I still planned to verify with my optometrist. For financial decisions, I cross-reference with official sources. For camera settings, I tested before the aurora peaked.
But here’s the key insight: AI has become my first draft, my starting point, my thought partner. It gets me 80% of the way there in 5% of the time. The remaining refinement is still my job – but the heavy lifting of gathering, synthesizing, and presenting relevant information? That’s been democratized.
My Invitation (or personal plea)
If you’re reading this and you’ve been hesitant about AI – maybe you think it’s “for tech people” or “not ready yet” or “too complicated” – I want you to try something.
Think of the last small question you had that you didn’t bother to answer. The manual you didn’t dig out. The comparison you didn’t make. The creative idea you didn’t pursue because the first step seemed like too much friction.
Now imagine just… asking.
That’s it. That’s the whole revolution. Not learning to code. Not mastering prompts. Just asking questions in plain language and being willing to iterate on the answers.
The Digital RenAIssance isn’t coming. It’s here. And it’s not about building apps or generating art or any of the headline-grabbing demonstrations.
It’s about an afternoon where you understand your battery better, make an informed decision about your glasses, plan a trip, set your camera for night mode, and find a deal on a good carpet cleaner – all in the space of an hour, done by an agent of your choosing*. For free.
Welcome to the era of the Free Personal Assistant. The only question left is the one that’s always mattered most:
What do you want to do next?
Steve, January 27, 2026
*The choice of agent is entirely yours. I use ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, CoPilot, Claude and others and rarely pay for advanced features. Even more astounding to me is this: As I was drafting this article, the tech world exploded first about Claude CoWork and shortly later about ClawdBot (now MoltBot) which gives you a 24/7 personal assistant to run tasks on your own computer, using your own files. They can even figure out how to write the code necessary to perform the task you ask it to do – even if it did not know how to do that task to begin with! In many ways, AI is already doing what I implore you humans do – don’t give up, just ask AI to help you through the stuff you don’t know so you can accomplish more than you ever could alone.