The Renaissance Man Is Back, and This Time Anyone Can Be One

It’s dark on Highway 90 between Marfa and Alpine, which is to say it’s really dark. Two 18-year-olds are in a Honda Accord, headed home, when the car starts to shudder and then lists to one side. Flat tire.

Neither of them has ever changed one.

The panic comes first, as it does. There’s a phone call to the parents that nearly gets made, and a call to the older brother that nearly gets made after that. Then the driver makes a different decision. He’s going to man up and figure it out.

So he opens an AI on his phone and asks it to walk him through it.

It does. Step by step, in plain language, the way a patient older cousin might. Loosen the lug nuts before the car is off the ground. Don’t trust the plastic trim; find the real jack point. When he tells it the car is a Honda Accord, it helps him find the right spot for that car. When he’s unsure, he asks again, and it answers again, without sighing.

Not long after, the spare is on and the Accord is rolling toward Alpine. Two kids who had never touched a lug wrench just did something their grandfathers would have called basic and their generation would have called a job for someone else.

It’s a small story. I think it’s also a very large one.

A manual is not a mentor.

The gate

For most of human history, being capable in many things was a privilege, and the privilege was guarded by a gate.

Think about what it took to learn a craft in Leonardo da Vinci’s world. You needed a master willing to take you on, which usually meant family connections or money. You needed years of apprenticeship before anyone let you near the real work. You needed access to books when books were rare and expensive. If you wanted to study anatomy, you needed someone to let you into the room. Every one of those was a door, and someone else held the key.

Leonardo got through those doors. We call him a genius, and he was. But part of what made him possible was access: patrons who paid for his time, workshops that taught him, and a lifetime in which to be curious. Millions of equally curious people were born in his era and never got through the first door.

The gate has been loosening for a long while. The printing press let ideas travel without a scribe. Libraries and schools opened rooms to people who’d never have been invited in. The internet put an enormous amount of information within reach of a phone.

But there was always one last obstacle: even with the information in front of you, you still needed someone to translate it. A manual is not a mentor. You could find a hundred pages about changing a tire and still not know which of them applied to your car, in the dark, with your hands shaking.

That’s what’s different now. AI meets you where you are. It answers in your language, at your pace, about your specific car, and it lets you ask the dumb question twice. For the first time, the mentor is available to nearly anyone, at any hour, for the price of a phone.

An 18-year-old on a dark highway walked through a gate that used to require a grandfather, an uncle, or a garage.

A dinner in Madagascar

I wanted to test the idea somewhere less familiar than a roadside, so I asked an AI how to conduct myself at a formal diplomatic dinner in Madagascar. I wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to see what would happen.

What came back wasn’t a Wikipedia entry. It was a short list of the ways a well-meaning American is most likely to go wrong.

You greet the person you know and overlook an elder. You meant to be friendly, but the omission can read as disrespect. Respect for elders is central to Malagasy custom, so acknowledge them deliberately and follow the receiving line or introductions.

You reach with the wrong hand. Here the AI got tangled. It told me both to offer my left hand and to keep my right hand free. So I did what the rest of this story is about: I checked. A protocol officer who has spent time in the region confirmed that the right hand is best for greetings and shouldn’t be holding anything when you’re not seated. When you’re seated, you’d stand for a greeting anyway, which gives you time to set down your glass. There are regional variations on the handshake, so follow your host’s lead if you can. A firm handshake, neither tight nor loose, always works.

You mistake hospitality for a transaction. You interrupt a toast with an enthusiastic “Cheers!” or wave off an unfamiliar dish with a quick “No thanks.” The better move is to pause, acknowledge the gesture, and respond warmly. If you can’t eat something, say quietly, “Thank you, that’s very kind. I’m unable to eat this because of a dietary restriction.” Tell the organizer beforehand when you can.

The humbling part is that your intention can be perfectly polite while your timing or gesture communicates something else.

Your intention can be perfectly polite while your timing or gesture communicates something else.

The question behind the question

Notice what happened with that handshake. The AI was mostly right, and in one spot it was confused. A human who knew the territory untangled it in two sentences.

Some people hear that and conclude AI can’t be trusted. I’d say the lesson is older than that: nothing you’re told should be accepted whole, whether it comes from a screen, a textbook, or a person with a title.

It may be the oldest habit of every great learner. Consider Leonardo’s notebooks. The largest surviving collection, the Codex Atlanticus, holds 1,119 leaves of his drawings and writing, spanning 1478 to 1519, from flight to weaponry to musical instruments, and from mathematics to botany. Another, the Codex Leicester, is just 72 pages of mirror script filled with his observations and theories on astronomy and the properties of water, rocks, fossils, air, and celestial light. In 1994, Bill Gates paid $30,802,500 for it, the most expensive manuscript ever sold at the time.

What those pages show isn’t a man who absorbed what he was told. They show a man who looked, drew, wondered, and wrote it all down so he could test it again. Galileo did it with the heavens. Socrates did it in the marketplace. Most people we remember as brilliant were, at some point, someone who politely refused to take an answer at face value.

The point was never to be difficult. The people who did it best were usually the most curious and often the most respectful of what they were examining. They questioned because they wanted to get it right.

AI deserves exactly that treatment, for a particular reason. It can be confidently, smoothly wrong. It can skip a safety step, flatten a living culture into a stereotype, or state an invention in the same calm tone as a fact. A tool that sounds equally sure whether it’s right or wrong demands a reader who isn’t.

Questioning isn’t contrarianism. It’s how understanding gets deeper.

The roadside paradox

Here’s the catch, and I think it’s the most interesting part.

Go back to that dark highway. The young man had no protocol officer to call and no time to cross-reference three sources. He was on the side of a road with a dead tire and a phone, and he had to take the AI more or less at its word. If you can’t change a tire and you’re stuck, how do you question the thing that’s teaching you?

You can’t always check it against an outside expert. But you can make it check itself.

Ask it: “What’s the most common mistake people make at this step?” Ask it: “What could go wrong if I do this incorrectly?” Ask it: “How would I know if I did this wrong?” Ask it to argue the opposite. Ask it to tell you where it’s least sure. Ask it to explain why, not just what.

None of that requires an expert. It requires the same instinct Leonardo had: don’t just receive the answer, press on it. A good learner on the side of the road isn’t someone who knows the answer. It’s someone who knows how to interrogate the source until the answer earns their trust.

Cheap knowledge, expensive judgment

Ask a room of executives how they feel about AI and you’ll hear everything from excitement to wariness. I’ve felt both myself, sometimes in the same afternoon. What settled me was a simple realization, and I suspect it’s what everyone in that room is circling: when knowledge becomes cheap, judgment becomes the scarce resource.

The person who wins in this era isn’t the one who knows the most. It’s the one who can learn something new on Tuesday, connect it to something old on Wednesday, question it on Thursday, and make a sound decision on Friday. Broad, curious, skeptical, accountable.

When knowledge becomes cheap, judgment becomes the scarce resource.

The return

We spent a century telling people to specialize. Pick a lane, go deep, stay in it. That made sense when learning was slow, expensive, and guarded. It makes less sense when a flat tire, a foreign dinner table, or a new field of study is one good question away.

The Renaissance Man isn’t a relic. He’s a pattern, and the pattern is available again, even to a teenager on the shoulder of a West Texas highway.

The gate is open. What’s left is the part no one can do for you: asking the next question.