[bencpeters]

Mostly right! Fly by wire doesn't inherently have to do with whether a pilot has the strength to move the controls or not - airliners in the pre fly-by-wire era still had hydraulic actuation of control surfaces, which allow pilots to multiply the force of their inputs. The main question/difference here is how much physical feedback the control system gives to the pilot - basically how much harder to move the stick it gets as the actual pressures on the control surface increase. Whether it's an electronic system or a hydraulic one in between the cockpit controls and the surfaces doesn't HAVE to mean that the physical feedback is all that different. It does make it easier to do non-linear ramping of the feedback though.

You also can do more complicated mappings of control inputs to control surface movements more easily with FBW (you can think of automatic traction control in a car as a somewhat analogous system - it uses differential braking per wheel, which the driver has no direct control over, to attempt to straighten out the path of the car and follow the driver's inputs from the steering wheel). As another comment mentioned, this has been happening in fighter jets for a long time, mostly due to how inherently aerodynamically unstable they are.