When AI becomes our AIR

Every generation gets it definitional new technology introduced to it. Each follows a predictable pattern of introduction to education to adoption to fulfillment potential. We can learn more about where are now with AI and what kind of tool it really will be, if we look at the history of how all of this unfolds each time.

PCs gave us classes at community colleges, PC For Dummies guides, and a new home appliance box to assemble, turned on and off, and dedicate time and space to in our dens and basement offices. No brand better embodies this than Compaq.

Then HTML classes were the educational on ramp to the digital age. You’d send the jr person on the team to take it so they could build a web site for the company. 

That we called it The ‘Net says everything about this place that you visited for 20 minutes a day, like taking a walk. Only someone stuck in 1998 would call it that.

Coding classes and boot camps were next, really the first DIY of it all. Java, Python, Ruby, etc for web sites but also apps.

Don’t you see now how the idea that you were “taking an AI class” today in 2026 will seem strangely “meta” in about 3 years? What you learn today is already out of date, and certainly won’t even be anything you can or will even need to use or do very soon. 

I’m not saying don’t bother taking the class, go do it. There’s just a takeaway that’s much more interesting because it tells us where AI is going, that AI won’t be a thing that we use or a prompt box to input; those will still be around but less important; AI be someday so fully operate everything we do and use that we won’t even think about it or directly interact at all.

It will simply work, and do what’s expected. And it’s wonderful to think about that life now, yet when we get there we’ll hardly be surprised and mostly we’ll be bored. 

Because as great as it’ll be, it will fulfill its total potential as a technology, like web sites or apps today – what’s the last app you added that truly blew you away? 

I’m not being a downer, the path from now to that point is at least ten years out, and this time will be filled with many more exciting, mind-blowing advances to come. There’s probably also a bubble pop before it’s over, which will mark the end of AI’s DIY era of prompts and a place you go to chat, and the beginning of the moment when AI starts to weave itself into the background and become the air we breathe.