The tools just became universal. Curiosity didn't

Somewhere on the drive to Brittany, we stopped in Amboise.

Leonardo da Vinci spent his final years there, invited by the King of France. We knew he was versatile. We were not prepared for the range: anatomy, hydraulics, flying machines, fortifications, architecture – and somewhere in between, a few paintings that turned out fine.

What stayed with me was how much of it had to wait. Some of those ideas couldn't be built for another three or four hundred years. His imagination ran centuries ahead of anything available to execute it.

Today he'd be advised to niche down. The work got complex, we split it up, and everything we built afterwards – schools, job titles, career paths – assumes you pick one. The universal mind just doesn't have a slot anymore.

And then AI arrived, and something strange happened: you no longer have to learn the thing to do the thing. Leonardo cut open bodies by candlelight to understand how a muscle pulls. I wanted a storyboard app, never learned to code, and just described it to a model until it existed.

So in theory, we can all be Leonardo now. His capabilities, handed over, no apprenticeship required. Which is incredible. It's also where the thinking usually stops – as if access were the same as ability.

Because breadth was never what made Leonardo Leonardo. He didn't collect disciplines. He chased one question across all of them: how things move. How water turns, how a wing carries, how a muscle pulls, how hair falls. The skills were downstream of the curiosity. Never the other way around.

And that's the part nobody hands you. Leonardo's limit was execution, ours is the exact inverse: we can build almost anything now, and most of us will use it to get through the week a little faster. Which is fine. It's also a decision, even when it doesn't feel like one.

Whatever you were curious about, before you learned it wasn't practical – that thing is now a weekend.

The tools just became universal. Curiosity didn't.