Two Thirds Done

Thoughts and experiences of an eighty one year old Wild Duck.

Avram Miller by the sea
EN | IT

587 posts since 2006

Author: avram miller

  • People Need Something to Lose

    Side view of a single-story building with a stone pathway, surrounded by greenery and trees.

    My garden was built by workers from Gaza in 1975

    A friend of my wife, a well-known television producer, is visiting Israel. During one of his meetings, he learned that on October 7 thousands of Gazans who were not Hamas fighters followed Hamas into Israel and took part in the atrocities. He was astonished.

    The Israeli army later estimated that about 6,000 Gazans crossed the border that day. About 3,800 were Hamas’s elite fighters. The other 2,200 or so were a mix of members of other armed groups and ordinary civilians. It is the civilians I want to talk about. Frankly, I was not surprised when I learned about this a few days after October 7. The civilians of Gaza had been living in what was called by some the “world’s largest open-air prison.” A prison, I have to add, that was run by a gang of inmates, Hamas. I was not surprised; this was the first time they could leave, and the opportunity to take “treasures” like automobiles, TVs and computers must have been so tempting. However, I was shocked to learn about the violence some of them committed against Israelis they found, including murder and rape. I do not want to conclude that these civilians were typical of the people living in Gaza. I do not know. I do know that since the 1990s, they have been systematically taught to hate Israelis.

    The Gaza I first knew

    I found myself thinking not only about October 7, but about the Gaza I first knew more than fifty years ago. I moved to Israel in 1974. Gaza and the West Bank were under Israeli military occupation, but the physical separation that exists today did not exist in anything like its present form. I lived close to the West Bank, and I regularly drove there to buy vegetables. I didn’t often go to Gaza as it was about forty miles away but I employed workers from Gaza to help me build my garden. This sounds almost unimaginable today.

    I don’t mean to romanticize the occupation at that time. Palestinians and Israelis certainly had grievances against one another then. But the relationship was different. There was human contact. The populations were intertwined economically and physically in ways that have largely disappeared.

    Oslo and the two intifadas

    This started to change with the first intifada, which began in 1987. Then came the Oslo peace agreement in 1993, and on July 1, 1994, Yasser Arafat returned, first to Gaza and a few days later to Jericho in the West Bank. I believe Israel, under a left-wing government at the time, was serious about a two-state solution, but Arafat was not. I also believe that Arafat stole billions from his own people, and his successor, Abbas, has faced persistent allegations of corruption, but that is another story.

    Over the next fifty years, Israel built walls, some physical, some political and some psychological. The government also kept expanding the Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in both the West Bank and Gaza, which had begun after the 1967 war, under the mistaken belief this would make Israel safer.

    How did we get from there to here?

    One of the decisive moments came in 2005.

    Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made the extraordinary decision to remove every Israeli settlement from Gaza and withdraw Israeli forces from inside that territory. Roughly 8,000 Israeli settlers were evacuated, some forcibly by Israeli soldiers and police.

    I remember how traumatic this was within Israel. Israelis watched Israeli soldiers carrying other Israelis from their homes.

    Whatever one thinks about Sharon’s decision, it created an extraordinary moment. For the first time since 1967, there were no permanent Israeli settlements or military bases inside Gaza. But there was opportunity.

    Hamas takes over

    What happened next was not what many people hoped for. In January 2006, Hamas defeated Fatah in Palestinian legislative elections. The struggle between the two movements eventually became violent, and in June 2007 Hamas seized control of Gaza. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority remained dominant in the West Bank. Gaza and the West Bank effectively became two different Palestinian political entities.

    The open-air prison

    Rocket attacks against Israel continued. Israel progressively tightened restrictions around Gaza, particularly after the Hamas takeover, while Egypt also severely restricted movement across its border.

    Gaza became increasingly isolated, “the world’s largest open-air prison.” One run by its imates.

    Israel controlled most access by land as well as Gaza’s airspace and maritime access. Egypt controlled the other land frontier. There was no functioning airport. Movement of people and goods became highly restricted, although Gazans could sometimes obtain permits to enter Israel for work, medical treatment and other purposes.

    There was an undeniable reality behind that phrase: roughly two million people were living in a very small territory from which leaving was extraordinarily difficult. It was a prison of geography, politics, security and history. And Hamas ruled inside it.

    A generation grew up behind the fence

    This is the part of the story that worries me most. Half the population of Gaza is under 18. They grew up without any knowledge of the world I had known in the 1970s, a world where someone from Gaza could work in my garden. Rather, they knew checkpoints, permits, rockets, Israeli air strikes, Hamas, periodic wars and a border fence separating them from a country they were taught to regard as their enemy.

    At the same time, Israelis living near Gaza grew up with rocket shelters, warning sirens and the knowledge that an organization committed to armed struggle against Israel governed just a few kilometers away.

    Each side accumulated its own memories. Each generation inherited the fears of the generation before it.

    Then came October 7, 2023.

    Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups broke through the Israeli defenses and attacked communities, military positions and a music festival. About 1,200 people were killed and roughly 250 were taken hostage.

    For Israelis, October 7 changed something fundamental. The border fence had represented security. Suddenly it represented the failure of security. And whatever sympathy many Israelis had once felt for the civilians living on the other side of that fence became much harder to sustain.

    The war that followed

    The war that then resulted brought death and destruction on an enormous scale to Palestinians. I do not support the actions Israel took and is taking after October 7 in Gaza. I think Israel should have first asked other countries to help it get its hostages back and to participate in disarming Hamas. Instead it acted out of rage. The rage is understandable, but the results were not good. I will not speak here of the ignorance of so many that only see Israel’s actions and do not assign any responsibility to Hamas and its supporters like Iran. Where does this end?

    Netanyahu’s responsibility

    The government of Netanyahu carries a heavy share of the responsibility for the situation. He has been in power about two-thirds of the time since 1996. He did not just ignore Gaza. For years he allowed Qatar to send money to Hamas there, because a divided Palestinian leadership suited him. What did he think would happen? Israel needed to work with other countries to find a solution for the people that lived there, not just build a bigger fence. The people of Gaza, like all people, deserved a decent life for themselves and their children. When you have nothing to lose, you will risk everything.

    My dream for Gaza

    I had, and still have, a dream for Gaza. Imagine, for a moment, something radically different.

    It starts with both Israel and Egypt offering land to create a “Gaza II” adjacent to the current one, “Gaza I.” Then imagine a massive regional development project involving Israel, Egypt, Palestinians and outside countries willing to finance it. New Palestinian communities would be built with modern infrastructure.

    Desalination plants could produce water, as they already do on a massive scale in Israel. Solar installations could produce abundant electricity. Modern agriculture could use some of that water and energy. New cities could be designed rather than improvised. Industry could provide jobs. A functioning port could connect the population with the outside world.

    Most importantly, imagine hundreds of thousands of young Palestinians waking up in the morning with someplace to go. A job, a business, a university, farms, and industry. A future!

    Can prosperity become part of security?

    We have spent decades trying walls, checkpoints, military deterrence, blockades, rockets and wars. They have not produced peace. We need a different way forward.

    The West Bank is equally difficult but needs a different solution

    I understand why many Israelis fear the creation of a Palestinian state immediately adjacent to Israel’s principal population centers. Israel is extremely narrow in places, and October 7 made territorial security concerns much more visceral.

    Palestinians, however, cannot reasonably be expected to live indefinitely without political rights, economic opportunity and control over their own future.

    At the same time, there are Israelis who regard the West Bank, Judea and Samaria as an inseparable part of the historical Land of Israel and support permanent Israeli control or annexation.

    These positions do not fit neatly together but that is the reality.

    I can imagine arrangements that might eventually reconcile Palestinian self-government with Israeli security. I have much more difficulty imagining the political leadership capable of implementing them today. And perhaps that is what saddens me most.

    A word about the hatred directed at Israel and at Jews in general

    My heart breaks to see how Israel and Jews in general are being treated. I have no problem with people being critical of the Israeli government. I am myself. But unless you think that every American is responsible for Donald Trump, you cannot think that every Israeli is responsible for Netanyahu, let alone non-Israeli Jews. How people can support Hamas is beyond me. I do not understand the stupidity of gay people that support the people that would kill them after cutting off their testicles. Women that support rapists who would cut off their breasts.

    The supporters of the Palestinians have accomplished nothing for the Palestinian people. They are not really for Palestinians because they know nothing about them. They are just against Israel and Jews. The result of their actions has only strengthened Israel’s resolve and feeling of isolation, which can lead to the government taking more actions against the Palestinians.

    I remember something different

    I keep returning to those men from Gaza who helped me build my garden in 1974.

    I don’t remember discussing geopolitics with them.

    They came to work and I paid them.

    We worked together, we smiled. My wife would bring them water. My children would play with them

    Then they went home to their wives and children

    It was hardly a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it was human contact, and human contact matters. Today a young Israeli and a young Gazan can live perhaps twenty kilometers apart and inhabit completely different universes. Each may know the other primarily as someone dangerous.

    Something to lose

    I don’t pretend to know how to solve it.

    I do believe, however, that security alone cannot be the objective. Nor can Palestinian nationalism, Israeli nationalism, revenge, historical entitlement or military victory by themselves produce a livable future.

    People need something to lose and something to love.

    They need homes, jobs, education, businesses and families whose futures seem more valuable than the promises offered by extremists.

    Maybe that sounds naïve after October 7 and the war that followed. Perhaps it is.

    But after watching this conflict for more than fifty years, I find the alternative much harder to believe: that another wall, another generation of hatred and another war will somehow produce a different result.

  • AI, longevity, and the End of Growing Old as we Know It

    I have been thinking about the impact of AI on health and what that will do to the concept of age.  Usually when we talk about longevity, we think about how much longer people will live.  Those of us who are more sophisticated about this topic break it down into health span and sick span, hoping we will have not only more days but better days.

    We may wonder if we will reach 100 or 120 or perhaps live even longer. This may be the least interesting question.  It assumes that we will just slow down our aging, but otherwise things will remain the same.  I don’t think it will be that simple, and the results might redefine who we actually are.

    Today we define aging as a simple process. I am 81. Next year I will be 82. If I am fortunate enough to be around ten years from now, I will be 91. That is chronological age, and there is nothing to be done about it. Time marches on. As the joke goes, “aging is better than the alternative.”

    But there is another concept: biological age.  This is an estimate of how old your body is functionally and physiologically, rather than how many years have passed since you were born.  There are a number of ways it is estimated. I will not go into that here.  Frankly, the various methods are still very primitive.  Most provide a single age.  I had my biological age measured by TruDiagnostic about three years ago. I was delighted that my biological age was computed as 15 years younger than my chronological age.  But I do not give this test or the other commercial tests much validity. They do not deal with the complexity of our bodies, and giving  age one number is where the biggest mistake starts.

    An essential issue of age is that not every part of us has the same life expectancy.  This has great implications. Imagine an 80-year-old whose body functions like that of the average 70-year-old. Now suppose medicine becomes increasingly effective at slowing aging. Ten years later that person is chronologically 90 but biologically 75. That would be quite an accomplishment.  At some point his life expectancy would increase by a year every year.  This is what is referred to as longevity escape velocity.  But as I said, just living longer does not really communicate what is likely to happen.

    So far the focus has been on slowing down the aging process.  But it is likely that we can actually reverse aging at some point. Now take it one step further. What if we become capable not merely of slowing biological aging but of reversing some of it? Our 80-year-old who was biologically 70 reaches 90 chronologically and has become biologically 60.

    Chronological age went up ten years. Biological age went down ten years.I imagine a graph showing this, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was the wrong graph.  It was one-dimensional because we are not a uniform age already.  Some of us have hearts five years younger than our chronological age but knees that are ten years older.

    We Have Never Been One Age

    There probably isn’t any such thing as one biological age. My liver could function like that of an average 60-year-old while my kidneys function like a 70-year-old’s. My cardiovascular system might be another age, my muscles another, my immune system another, my brain another.

    This isn’t science fiction. Human aging has always been heterogeneous. Different organs and systems age at different rates, and researchers are now developing ways to measure those differences. So perhaps we shouldn’t talk about our biological age. We should talk about our biological ages. We have always been mosaics of age.

    What AI and biotechnology will do is make those differences much greater. Suppose we become very good at rejuvenating muscle but nowhere near as good at rejuvenating skin. I might look 70 and have the strength of a 40-year-old. Suppose we also become extraordinarily good at maintaining cognition. I could have an 80-year-old face, 70-year-old kidneys, a 50-year-old cardiovascular system and a brain performing like a 40-year-old’s.

    So how old am I really?

    The question itself begins to lose its meaning. Knowing one’s chronological age is a recent development.  But it has become a big factor. It has been remarkably useful shorthand. It is important data with respect to understanding someone’s personal history and the things they may have experienced, but it does not tell you their biological age. Tell me someone is 20, 50 or 80 and I immediately have some idea of what that person looks like, how strong they are, what they are physically capable of and, to some extent, what their health risks are. Those things have always travelled together. Perhaps they won’t anymore.

    We May Be as Old as Our Weakest Part

    There is another way I think about aging, particularly when I think about myself. I sometimes say that we are as old as our oldest critical part. More precisely, we are as old as our most vulnerable critical part.

    I can be in excellent shape. My muscles can be strong, my brain can function beautifully, and my heart can be doing its job. But my kidneys are giving out. If one essential system is deteriorating rapidly, that system may determine how long I live. The average doesn’t help when a single critical component fails.

    This is one reason I spend so much time trying to understand what is happening inside my own body. I look at blood tests, MRIs, heart data, sleep data and anything else I can measure. I am particularly interested in trends. I don’t simply want to know whether today’s measurement falls within some population’s definition of “normal.” I want to know whether something is changing. I stay alert.

    In a real sense, I am hunting. I am trying to identify, as early as possible, what is going to try to kill me. I don’t think of that as morbid. I think of it as sensible. If something is going to become a serious problem, I would much rather discover it five years too early than six months too late.

    Cancer is a good example. I have already dealt with it three times: prostate cancer, melanoma and bladder cancer. I don’t think that means I have won my war with cancer. I have won three battles, and I assume there could be others.

    Surveillance is part of staying alive.

    This is one of the areas where AI will make an enormous difference. Today medical information is fragmented. One specialist looks at one system. Another physician looks at something else. Blood tests are taken occasionally, imaging is done occasionally, and wearables produce still another stream. Each provides a piece of the picture. But who is continuously looking at the whole?  I have now integrated all my medical information into an AI agent—an agent that has access to 30 years of my medical data and knows my blood chemistry, imaging, medications, genetics, exercise, sleep, heart rhythms, blood pressure, cognitive performance and hundreds of other measurements, as well as my genetic information. More importantly, it knows me. It can see patterns most, if not all, doctors would miss. Instead of asking whether today’s kidney measurement is normal for an 81-year-old man, it asks whether something has changed from what has been normal for Avram over the last fifteen years. Perhaps no individual change is alarming. But the agent sees five subtle changes occurring together and says: something is happening here. Let’s find out what it is. It can also make suggestions about the things that I can do to improve my longevity.

    This will transform medicine. We would move from waiting for disease to reveal itself toward continually searching for the next weak link. Fix the cardiovascular problem and perhaps the kidneys become the limiting factor. Fix the kidneys and perhaps it is cancer. Control cancer and perhaps neurodegeneration becomes the problem. Then we go after that. Longevity becomes an ongoing process of finding and repairing the next weakest link as well as strengthening the others.

    What if we don’t grow old together?

    There is another consequence I hadn’t thought about until recently. We assume that people grow old together at the same rate.

    Imagine a couple who are five years apart when they marry. Fifty years later they are still five years apart. Chronologically, that will always be true. Biologically, perhaps it won’t. Suppose a new rejuvenation treatment becomes available. One partner responds extraordinarily well because of some combination of genetics, immune function and biological circumstance. The other doesn’t. Ten years later they might be chronologically 85 and 90, but one functions like someone who is 50 while the other functions like someone who is 85. A five-year difference has effectively become a 35-year difference.

    What does that do to a marriage? One person may want to travel, work, ski, start a company or begin another entire chapter of life. The other may increasingly need care. We have always talked about growing old together. Perhaps some couples won’t.

    And then it gets stranger. Suppose their children are in their sixties. The rejuvenated 90-year-old parent could be biologically and functionally younger than their 65-year-old child. Who is the old person? Who takes care of whom?

    We are accustomed to generations moving through life in a predictable order. Parents get old. Children become middle-aged. Eventually the children may care for the parents. But what happens when biological age no longer respects generations? Two people born on the same day might eventually be biologically separated by decades.

    If we want to have children at a later age, we will be able to.  So it will not be so uncommon to have parents with children younger than their grandchildren.  Yes, another breakdown in what we have considered to be normal.

    Human relationships are based partly on the fact that we move through life together. Changing the rate at which individuals age could therefore change marriage, friendship, caregiving and the relationship between parents and children. One of the strangest consequences of defeating aging may be discovering that we no longer age together.

    What happens to the stages of life?

    That raises an even larger question. Our entire civilization is organized around the assumption that a human life follows a predictable curve. We grow up. We go to school. We work. We raise families. We retire. We grow old. Eventually we die. We can divide life into three ages: the first is where we learn, the second is where we apply, and the third is where we retire.

    Why should education be concentrated in the first twenty or twenty-five years of life if you might remain cognitively vigorous for a century? Why have one career? Perhaps people will have five. Why retire at 65 if you are biologically 45? Why accumulate money for a retirement that may last longer than your entire working life once did? Why inherit your parents’ money at 60 if your parents are biologically younger than you?

    Longevity could require us to redesign institutions we don’t normally think of as having anything to do with biology: education, careers, retirement, marriage, inheritance, pensions, politics. The stages of life themselves may begin to disappear.

    Youth may become a luxury good

    There is also an uncomfortable economic dimension to all of this. The first really effective rejuvenation technologies are unlikely to be cheap, and wealthy people will probably get them first. That could create an entirely new way of displaying wealth.

    Today we recognize wealth through houses, cars, clothes and travel. In the future we may recognize it by looking at the person. You meet someone who is chronologically 85 but looks 60, moves like someone who is 45 and has the energy and cognitive ability of someone decades younger. You immediately know something about them: they can afford it.

    But there is another possibility. People may change what they choose to spend their money on. Suppose you aren’t extraordinarily wealthy, but you have accumulated some savings. You can buy a bigger house. You can buy an expensive car. Or you can buy another ten healthy years. What do you choose?

    I suspect a lot of people will choose the years. The ultimate luxury may turn out not to be something you own. It may be time. Or, more precisely, the ability to remain capable while time passes.

    Politics Without a Single Age

    Politics could get particularly strange. Today an aging politician inevitably faces questions about age. But imagine an 82-year-old candidate saying: “Yes, I am chronologically 82. But my cardiovascular age is 58, my cognitive age is 52 and my physical performance is equivalent to the average 55-year-old.”

    Candidates might release biological-age reports alongside their medical records. Of course, we would immediately begin arguing about the measurements. Which test counts? Who administers it? Can campaigns choose whichever biological clock makes their candidate look youngest?

    But the fundamental political question could change. Instead of asking whether this person is too old to be president, we might ask which parts of this person are actually old.

    And there is a more uncomfortable possibility. If rejuvenation is expensive, wealthy politicians might be biologically younger precisely because they can afford treatments unavailable to many of the people voting for them.

    The geopolitics of youth

    The same paradox exists between countries. Many of today’s richest countries are also among the oldest. Birth rates are low and populations are aging. Meanwhile, many poorer countries possess something rich countries increasingly lack: young people.

    But what happens if wealthy countries learn how to make old people young? Not chronologically young; an 80-year-old remains 80. But suppose that 80-year-old has the cardiovascular system of someone who is 50, the muscles of someone who is 45 and the cognitive capabilities of someone considerably younger. Suddenly an aging population doesn’t necessarily mean a declining population.

    We could have two kinds of young countries. One is young because its people were recently born. The other is young because its people can afford not to become biologically old. Which has the greater advantage? I don’t know.

    A young African country might have millions of energetic people entering the workforce. A wealthy European or Asian country might have scientists, physicians, engineers and entrepreneurs remaining highly productive into their eighties and nineties. Imagine a scientist with sixty years of experience and the cognitive capabilities we currently associate with middle age. Experience itself begins to compound.

    And eventually rejuvenation technologies may become inexpensive. Then the balance changes again, as countries with large populations of naturally young people acquire the same technologies. Perhaps someday we won’t simply ask how many people live in a country or what their median age is. We will ask how old those people are biologically, and who can afford to keep them young.

    Why stop at just younger?

    But there is an assumption buried in everything I have written so far that I increasingly question. Why is youth the objective? Why should I be satisfied if, at 90, I have the cognitive capabilities I had at 40? Why shouldn’t I be smarter than I was at 40?

    I think of myself as a cognitive athlete.  I believe cognitive training has played an important role in my own cognitive development. I have never been interested simply in holding on. I want to get better: to learn faster, recognize patterns better, improve memory and attention, understand complicated things more easily. I don’t merely want to avoid becoming less capable as I get older. I want to become more capable.

    AI could make that idea enormously more powerful. Imagine an AI that understands precisely how I learn, that knows my strengths and weaknesses and continually develops experiences and exercises designed to improve my cognition. Combine that eventually with advances in neuroscience, pharmacology, neurostimulation, brain-computer interfaces and things we haven’t yet imagined. Then perhaps the objective isn’t maintaining intelligence. It is increasing it.

    Could we turn ordinary people into what we would today call geniuses? Why not at least ask the question? We accept that years of training can transform an ordinary human body into that of an extraordinary athlete. Why assume the brain must remain permanently limited to whatever nature happened to give us?

    And why stop with the brain?

    I have never thought of myself as a physical athlete. It simply hasn’t interested me very much. But it interests lots of other people.

    Imagine someone who has spent a lifetime running. Today, success at 80 means running remarkably well for an 80-year-old. Perhaps someday that qualifier disappears. Suppose regenerative medicine restores muscles, joints and tendons. Cardiovascular treatments improve oxygen delivery. AI continually optimizes training, nutrition and recovery for that particular individual. At 85, that runner might not merely run as well as she did at 60. She might run faster than she did at 35. A swimmer might set a personal record at 90. Someone might become stronger at 75 than they ever were at 30. Then the familiar human life curve of growth, peak and decline no longer describes us. Perhaps your best memory occurs at 75. Your greatest intellectual achievement at 90. Your fastest running time at 80. Your most creative period at 100.

    “Longevity” seems an inadequate word for that. This isn’t simply living longer. It is continuing to develop.

    How old would you feel?

    There may also be an age that has nothing to do with biology.

    Suppose I am chronologically 110. My body functions like that of someone who is 50. My cognitive abilities are better than they were when I was 40. But I still have 110 years of memories. I have watched people be born and die. I have experienced relationships, successes, failures, grief, love and perhaps several completely different careers.

    Would I feel 50? I doubt it.

    We might create people who are physically young and cognitively extraordinary but psychologically unlike any humans who have ever existed. Imagine possessing the physical vitality of middle age with a century of lived experience. We have no idea what that person would be like.

    Just speculation

    Almost everything I have described may prove wrong in timing or degree. Measuring aging is not the same as reversing it. AI may give us increasingly sophisticated maps of how our organs are aging long before medicine gives us reliable ways of making those organs young again. Some forms of aging may prove extraordinarily difficult to reverse. Some interventions may work only for certain people. Some may have consequences we didn’t anticipate. There is no guarantee that an 80-year-old will ever be able to become biologically 50.

    But I don’t think we need to know that these things will happen to think seriously about what would follow if even some of them do. The direction of travel is already interesting. We are getting better at measuring biology. We are getting better at manipulating biology. And AI is getting better at finding patterns in complexity that human beings could never hope to understand unaided.

    Put those three things together and it seems reasonable to ask some very unreasonable-sounding questions.

    We created AI. Will AI create us?

    And that brings me to the strangest thought of all.

    Humans created AI. But perhaps AI will create the humans of the future.

    We created artificial intelligence with the brains evolution gave us. Now AI may help us understand those brains well enough to improve them. Those improved brains may then become better at creating AI. That more powerful AI becomes better at improving us. And around we go.

    Smarter humans create smarter AI. Smarter AI creates smarter humans.

    For hundreds of thousands of years, evolution determined the basic capabilities of Homo sapiens. We didn’t choose our memory capacity. We didn’t choose how quickly we learn. We didn’t choose how long our muscles remain strong or how our brains age. We inherited all of that.

    Perhaps that is about to change. For the first time, intelligence itself may participate in designing its successor. And that successor may be us.

    Which means that perhaps I started this essay with the wrong question. The question isn’t how long humans will live. It isn’t even how young we can remain. The question is: what will a human being be?

    I have no idea. But I increasingly suspect that the humans living at the end of this century will not simply be longer-lived versions of us. They may be something we have never seen before.  And at 81 there is even a small possibility that some form of me will be around to observe it.

    Humans created AI. The great irony may be that AI’s most important creation turns out to be the next version of humans.

  • Goodbye Ben Rosen

    These days, I seem to be saying goodbye to so many old friends who have left us. I guess at 81 I should not be so surprised, but it still makes me sad. Ben made it to 93. I last saw him in 2019. Ben Rosen is best known for being chairman of Compaq Computer, a company he played a substantial role in both creating and running. In my opinion, Compaq had more to do with creating the PC revolution than IBM did.

    It was around 1980 that I first met Ben. He was still an analyst at Morgan Stanley. I had recently been put in charge of Digital Equipment’s initial efforts to create a personal computer, the Professional Series. I was asked to give a presentation to a group of financial analysts that included Ben. It was the first time I had ever spoken to such a group. Ben reached out to me after the talk, and we started a conversation that lasted for decades.

    In 1982, I attended PC Forum, a conference Ben had started and would soon sell to Esther Dyson. It was at that conference that Ben showed me the first computer from Compaq. It had not yet been announced, so he showed it to me in secret.

    I didn’t get it. I found it big, ugly, and heavy. Yes, it was portable, but you certainly wouldn’t have wanted to carry it very far. More importantly, it was compatible with the IBM PC but I did not know how important that would become but Ben did.

    IBM had introduced its Personal Computer only a year earlier, and it was not yet clear that the standards around that computer would come to dominate the PC industry. I still thought the computer I was developing at Digital, which was announced the day of PC Forum, had a chance of becoming the leader. What I failed to understand back then was the importance of those two things together: it was portable and compatible with the IBM PC. Compaq understood where the industry was going before most of us did. It helped turn the IBM PC from an IBM product into an industry standard. That is why I believe Compaq ultimately had more to do with creating the PC revolution than IBM itself.

    Everything I thought about personal computers was pretty much wrong. But I was not alone. But I learned quickly and by 1984, I was at Intel just as the PC industry was taking off.

    Over the years, Ben and I developed a friendship. I loved his smile and his gentle personality. He was a real mensch. He had a good and consequential life. While I am sad at his death, I can’t help but smile at his memory.

    Goodbye, Ben.

  • A Photograph from 1996 with Remarkable People including Andy Grove


    Starting at Andy and going clockwise, Dave Goldberg, Renee James, Sheri Herman, Ron Whittier, Hassan Miah, Matthew Cowan, Josh Geer, Avram Miller and Allee Willis.

    I recently learned that my old friend Sheri Herman had died.

    Sadly, the deaths of friends are becoming more frequent events these days. I don’t know exactly how old Sheri was, but I believe she was in her late sixties. Her sister said that she died in her sleep from some kind of cardiac event. I am grateful that she died without pain or fear. Sheri and I met in 1996, at the dawn of the commercial Internet.

    Michael Ovitz, the co-founder and CEO of Creative Artists Agency, and I had put together a joint initiative between CAA and Intel. Our purpose was to introduce Hollywood’s creative community to the possibilities of digital entertainment. The venture included a Media Lab housed at CAA’s offices on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, as well as an effort to invest in companies creating content for the emerging digital world. Ovitz and I shared what turned out to be a mistaken belief: that entertainment for the Internet would come primarily from the established media industry. Things worked out very differently.

    Two members of my Intel Capital team, Matthew Cowan and Sriram Viswanathan, were based at CAA. On the CAA side were Sandy Climan, who remains a dear friend, and Bob Kavner, a former senior AT&T executive who was in the process of fleeing  from AT&T to the future, was also involved in helping set up what we called the Media Lab at CAA.

    Matthew and Sriram went on to become very successful venture capitalists. I am proud of both of them and think of them as family. They learned the trade, so to speak, from me, and we remain very close.

    Sheri and The Spot

    The Spot home of America Cybercast-Internet Entertainment in 1996

    Sheri had built a career in the entertainment industry and had served as a senior vice president at E! Entertainment Television. When I knew her, she was running The Spot, an early Internet company built around an online soap opera called American Cybercast. Its fictional characters maintained online diaries, and the audience could follow and interact with their unfolding lives.

    This was 1996. The World Wide Web itself was still young. No one knew how dominant the internet would become although I strongly suspected this would be the case.

    One evening, we organized a dinner in a private room at the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard. Andy Grove, then Intel’s CEO, and Ron Whittier, an Intel senior vice president, were visiting Los Angeles. We invited the leaders of several companies in which Intel had invested.

    Matthew Sends Me a Photograph

    Announcement of the Media Lab (Intel and CAA)

    When I told Matthew that Sheri had died, he sent me a photograph from that dinner.

    I remember the evening well. But it was painful to study all the young faces and realize that four of the people in the photograph are no longer with us:

    • Andy Grove, then CEO of Intel.
    • Dave Goldberg, founder of Launch Media—later Yahoo! Music—and the late husband of Sheryl Sandberg.
    • Sheri Herman, former senior vice president at E! and CEO of The Spot.
    • Allee Willis, the immensely talented songwriter and wonderfully original person who was creating something called Willisville, an idea that, only now, technology may be capable of fully realizing.

    Dave Goldberg had founded Launch Media around what were then called “enhanced CDs.” These were music CDs containing photographs, liner notes and other supplementary material that could be viewed when the disc was placed in a computer. I remember meeting Dave and asking him how his technology could move to the Internet. His answer made it clear that he knew very little about the Internet at the time. But Dave was quick and sharp, and he immediately understood the opportunity.

    Launch Media eventually moved online and was acquired by Yahoo! It proved to be a very good investment for Intel. In fact, the return on that one investment paid for the entire CAA/Intel initiative including the dinner at the House of Blues. Dave later met Sheryl Sandberg, the former COO of Facebook and they married.

    There are several other people in the photograph whom I should mention. Hasan Miah managed the joint activity from the CAA side. He went on to become an investor and entrepreneur across many areas of technology.

    Josh Greer ran a company called Digital Planet and is now focused on eldercare. I am glad to report that both Hasan and Josh are alive and well.

    Ron Whittier was one of Intel’s earliest employees and held several prominent positions during his long career there. Andy had given him responsibility for managing many of Intel’s software relationships, including the crucial relationship with Microsoft. Ron was also the senior executive with whom I worked most closely on our media investments. 

    Sitting next to Dave Goldberg is Renée James. Renée later became president of Intel and is now the founder, chair and CEO of Ampere Computing. Renée and I remain friends, although we are not often in touch.

    It was Renée who indirectly gave me the title of my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck. She once told me that Andy thought of me as Intel’s “wild duck.”

    We Were So Young

    It is difficult for me to comprehend how young we all were. Andy was not yet sixty. He would probably consider me, now  at eighty-one, an old fart.  Andy was seventy-nine when he died, two years younger than I am today. Sadly, he suffered from Parkinson disease in his final years.

    Ron Whittier is now ninety, close to the age Andy would be if he were still alive. From recent photos I have seen, he seems to be doing well.

    I wish all the surviving people in that photograph continued health and long lives. They are or were remarkable people. 

    Sheri’s Gift

    Sheri and I probably had not spoken in twenty years. We went our separate ways and eventually had little in common, although I would occasionally hear from her.

    But Sheri gave me the greatest gift of my life. She introduced me to my wife, Deborah. For that, I will always be grateful.

    And what about me?

    At eighty-one, I still embrace the future.  I still hang out with people the age of those in the photo.  Looking at that photograph, I see an amazing evening filled with extraordinary people. Each of them, in different ways, led a life of contribution, curiosity and joy.

    I am thankful to have been part of their club.

  • Rewired: Life in the Third Age

    I recently asked ChatGPT a simple question: “Would you describe me as elderly?”

    I confess I already knew the answer. I just wanted to start a dialogue with my buddy Chat.

    Technically, yes. I am 81 years old, and by most demographic definitions that makes me elderly. But the word does not feel right. “Elderly” suggests someone frail, diminished, dependent, disengaged from the future. That is not how I see myself, and it is not how I see my sister, who is close to my age.

    We are certainly old. There is no point in pretending otherwise. I have lived more than eight decades, and my body occasionally reminds me of that fact even when my mind would prefer to ignore it. But old and elderly are not the same thing. One is a count of years. The other is a description of how you live them.

    I do not feel that my life’s work is finished. I am still involved with new companies, new technologies, and new ideas. I was recently named a Fellow at the Italian Institute of Technology. I give speeches and sit for interviews with journalists. My wife and I are renovating a palazzo built in 1731 in the historic center of Lecce, in a country still relatively new to me. I am learning Italian. I am playing the piano, writing, traveling, and experimenting with artificial intelligence while trying to think clearly about what it means for the future of humanity. Some of these projects will take years. I undertake them on the assumption that there will be years, and that I will be here to finish them.None of that is what “elderly” describes. The problem is that we do not have a good word for what it is.

    “Senior citizen” sounds bureaucratic. It belongs on a discounted train ticket. “Older adult” is accurate but lifeless. “Active senior” sounds like an advertising category invented to sell cruises, retirement communities, and vitamin supplements. “Elder” has more dignity, but it casts you as someone who dispenses wisdom from the sidelines. I am glad to share whatever wisdom I have acquired, as I have been doing my whole life. I am not interested in living on the sidelines. I still want a significant role, including a leadership role, in the things I care about.

    We are not short of a name for the period itself.

    Gerontologists have used the third age for half a century, and so has the University of the Third Age, which has been running since the 1970s. It is a decent name: neutral, clear, and free of any implication of decline. In the first age we prepare ourselves — learning, experimenting, becoming. In the second we build careers, raise families, accumulate responsibilities, establish a place in the world. The third begins when those obligations loosen their grip, when what we do becomes more a matter of choice than of duty.

    Readers of this blog will notice I have been circling the subject for a while. I called it Two Thirds Done because that is roughly where I felt I stood. I was wrong about the arithmetic, but right about the shape. What we lack is not a name for the stage. It is a word for the people living in it, and for the posture they take toward it.

    My suggestion is rewired

    Retirement assumes that when the duties stop, the doing stops along with them. You are unplugged, honorably, and set down somewhere pleasant. Rewiring assumes the opposite. The current is still on. It has simply been routed somewhere new, and the new circuit is one you get to design yourself which is more than most of us could say about the second age.

    The conventional script says the third age is when you finally stop and enjoy yourself. I think we have that sideways. We should keep learning until we no longer can. We should stay productive, to some degree, until we no longer can. And we should enjoy our lives from the day we are born until we no longer can. Enjoyment is not a stage. It is a practice.

    For earlier generations, the third age was short. People worked until 65, retired, and often died within ten or fifteen years. Longer lives, better health, greater prosperity, and new technology have changed that. Many of us will now spend twenty or even thirty years here.

    That is too long to treat as an epilogue

    Rewiring is not a matter of age. One person rewires at 65, another at 75, and some never do. Nor does it require exceptional health. We have illnesses, limitations, and losses; at this point in life, most of us do. What matters is that we remain independent, engaged, curious, and oriented toward the future. This is not about passing the time that remains. It is about still having plans.

    I should say plainly that circumstance matters here. Good health, some money, work that still wants me, I did not arrange all of that myself, and I know it. Not everyone gets the same runway. But that is an argument for making the third age more available, not for pretending it does not exist.

    The distinction matters because language shapes expectation. If society files everyone past a certain age under “elderly,” it quietly teaches us to expect less of them — and eventually to expect less of ourselves.

    None of this denies mortality. If anything, we are more conscious of time than younger people are. We know the runway ahead is shorter than the one behind. That knowledge creates urgency, but it also creates clarity. There is less reason to do things because they are expected of us and more reason to spend our attention on what we find meaningful. I rejoice in this.

    The third age may offer something the earlier ones could not: experience without so much obligation, ambition without the same hunger for recognition, and curiosity supported by a lifetime of accumulated knowledge.

    My sister and I are not young. We are not middle-aged. Neither of us feels elderly. My wife, Deborah, is 63, which by the common definition puts her close to the same category, an absurdity that tells you most of what you need to know about the category. We still share the kind of love teenagers believe they invented. Every time I see her, I light up.

    So if you are of a certain age, do not let them make you feel elderly.

    And if you have not yet reached it, do not plan your retirement. Plan your rewirement.

  • Would You Like to Talk to My Digital Twin?

    Today’s large language models remind me of banner ads in the early days of the internet. They are impressive, useful, and often surprising but I don’t think they represent where AI is ultimately headed.

    I’ve written before about forms of AI that will touch us much more personally. AI that feels less like a tool, an employee, or an assistant, and more like a companion or collaborator. I am especially interested in using AI to augment human intelligence rather than replace it. I call this Hybrid Intelligence. 

    As part of exploring that future, I came across a company called Onix. Full disclosure: I am an indirect investor through a venture fund in which I am a limited partner.

    The founders of Onix started with an interesting observation. Most of humanity’s knowledge isn’t floating around on the public internet. It exists inside people’s heads. It’s the accumulated experience of physicians, lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs, investors, scientists, teachers, and countless other experts. Much of that knowledge has never been written down, and even when it has, many experts have no desire to hand it over to Google, OpenAI, or anyone else.

    So Onix built a platform for creating digital twins of experts.

    The platform doesn’t simply collect publicly available information. It also allows experts to contribute their own private knowledge while retaining control over it. That’s a critical distinction. A tax attorney, financial advisor, or management consultant may be happy to share decades of experience with clients—but not by giving it away to the world.

    Onix has also created a business model that allows experts to monetize their expertise. That’s important for professionals whose income is ultimately limited by the number of hours they can work.

    I think this approach has real merit.

    When Onix was developing its platform, I was one of the first people to create a digital twin. Today the company is focusing primarily on health and wellness as its initial market and area that I believe has great potential, but my digital twin was trained on something quite different: entrepreneurship, venture investing, technology, innovation, and the lessons I’ve learned over the past sixty years.

    If you’re curious, I’d love for you to try it.

    Download the iOS app: https://onix.life/app

    Invitation code: AvramVIP

    Here are two examples of the kinds of conversations we’ve had.

    Why did you start Intel Capital?

    Ah, Intel Capital. That’s a story that goes back to 1991, although I’d already been making minority investments since 1988, reporting to Les Vadasz. Les and I really co-founded it.

    We had three objectives:

    • Gain strategic insight into emerging technologies.
    • Grow Intel’s existing business by strengthening its ecosystem.
    • Generate an attractive financial return.

    Initially, I focused as much on acquisitions as investments. We explored buying companies like Cisco and 3Com, but those opportunities never materialized. I eventually realized that Intel’s culture was so strong that acquisitions were often rejected by the organization almost like antibodies attacking a foreign object.

    That insight led us to emphasize minority investments instead. Intel Capital ultimately became enormously successful financially, but my biggest regret is that although we often saw the future before others did, we weren’t always able to persuade Intel to change its long-term direction. We had a remarkable window into what was coming, but the mothership didn’t always turn.

    What is the most important skill for the future?

    The most important skill isn’t accumulating knowledge. AI can do that better and faster than any of us.

    The truly valuable skill is imagination—the ability to see what doesn’t yet exist, connect unrelated ideas, ask questions that no one else is asking, and envision entirely new possibilities.

    In the era of Hybrid Intelligence, where humans and AI will increasingly work together, imagination becomes our greatest competitive advantage.

    Right beside imagination is adaptability. Technology is changing so quickly that we all need to be lifelong learners. The people who thrive will be those who remain curious, embrace change, and continuously reinvent themselves.

    Imagine. Adapt. Stay curious. That’s the Wild Duck’s guide to the future.

    I hope you’ll spend a few minutes talking with my digital twin. More importantly, I’d love to know what you think, not only about how well it captures me, but about the broader idea of preserving and sharing human expertise through AI.

  • To My Grandsons

    I am writing this at the age of 81. Your ages range from 16 to 23. You have never known me as a young man, and I will never know you as old ones. We share only a short stretch of time, perhaps 20 or 30 years, about a third of my life.

    We do not see one another very often. It is not like the days when you were children and would visit me at my home in Sonoma. Now you are busy building lives of your own, and even three of you no longer live with your parents. I know what that is like. Once I became an adult, I spent very little time with my own parents, let alone my grandparents.

    I was once young too. Sometimes I wonder whether, if we had been the same age, we might have been friends. I hope so.

    There were occasions when you and I all came together such as a bar mitzvah or an important birthday, like when my father turned 90 or I turned 70. But now we are scattered all over the world.

    Perhaps one of you will get married while I am still alive, and the family will come together again for that celebration. But most likely, I will see each of you separately from time to time. Perhaps you will visit me in Italy, where I now live. You will always be welcome.

    I wrote a book about my life, The Flight of a Wild Duck. I never expected you to read it when it was published, but it is there, waiting for you if you ever become curious. In the meantime, please ask me questions. Many people, as they grow older, regret not having asked their parents and grandparents more while they still had the chance. I certainly do. So please take advantage of the opportunity I am offering you.

    I never had the chance to talk with my father’s parents about their childhoods. I knew more about my mother’s mother, and even her grandmother, because we were all close when I was growing up. Even so, there is still so much I wish I had asked them.

    While I cannot know you beyond my own lifetime, I can help you understand where you came from and what shaped the years before you arrived. I hope that one day you will tell some of these stories to your own children, whom I may never have the chance to meet.

    Fortunately, we live in a remarkable age. I will leave behind not only letters like this, but books, blog posts, photographs, recordings, and interviews. Your children may someday be able not only to read my words but also to see me, hear my voice, and perhaps know me a little, even though we will never meet. I am hoping to create a digital twin so that they can interact with me, hear my voice, see my face and ask me questions.

    I often wonder about the world you will inherit. It will be very different from the one in which I grew up, and it will present challenges I cannot even imagine. I hope I have given you some tools for dealing with that future. You have all had excellent educations, and you will continue learning throughout your lives. But remember that some of life’s most important lessons are not taught in schools. They are learned from experience, from failure, from love, from loss, and sometimes from listening to someone who has simply lived a very long time. I still have much to offer you should you wish. I would love to teach you about the importance of imagination, of the joy in discovery, of responsibility to make the world a better place.

    As I write this, I find myself smiling, trying to imagine you, many decades from now, sitting down to write a letter to one of your own grandchildren. If that day comes, I hope you will remember that you are part of a long story, one that began long before you were born and will continue long after you are gone. We each get to write only a few chapters. My hope is that mine will help you write yours a little better and most importantly, you will know the possibilities than only love can offer.

    Grandpa Avram

  • Avram Goes Video

    My blog posts are now available as short videos on my new YouTube channel. You can subscribe here. I will also put a link on blog posts for which I have created videos. I hope you enjoy the new format. Here is an example:

    My primary form of communication has been writing blog posts, along with posts on social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Yet I myself consume a lot of video from YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

    It is a bit strange, because during the majority of my career I often gave speeches, sometimes to audiences of over a thousand people. Most of those were never recorded, although a few were, such as my testimony to Congress regarding the development of HDTV and interviews on news shows.

    Over the last 20 years, I have done a number of video interviews, especially around the time of the publishing of my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck.

    I still give talks, but not often. For instance, I gave a speech at the World Business Forum, which was held in Milan in November 2025.

    I am really comfortable speaking and love having an audience, especially one that can ask me questions. But when I have tried to make videos on my own, they are really awful. I am stilted and have no energy. I need a live audience — but perhaps one of the AIs can simulate this for me.

    However, I have now found an easy way to create videos from my blog posts using NotebookLM’s video generation capability.

    Next, I intend to create a clone of my voice to replace the voice that NotebookLM uses.

    I would be grateful for your comments. Do you think the videos do a good job of capturing what I wrote on my blog? Do you prefer the video or the written blog? Do you think using a clone of my own voice would make this more interesting?

  • A Favor to Ask

    I have been writing this blog since 2007. There are about 570 posts with 430,000 word which is equivalent to about five books.

    I have never worked very hard at getting anyone to read it. Which is a strange thing to admit, because I clearly want people to read it. Otherwise, I would have just kept a diary.

    This week I finally sat down and looked at the numbers properly.

    What I found

    For years I believed I had around fifteen hundred subscribers. I did not. 640 of you receive these posts by email. Another 500 or so follow the blog in a WordPress app and never see an email at all. And 700 more signed up, were sent a confirmation link they never clicked, and have been sitting in limbo ever since, some for years, probably wondering why I stopped writing.

    Several of you have told me exactly this. You subscribed and never heard from me. I am sorry. I did not know, and the dashboard kept telling me everything was fine.

    (more…)

  • The Personal Climate Opportunity

    The Earth is heating up very quickly, and the things we needed to deal with climate change, we did not do. Governments have talked, held conferences, made commitments and set targets. Some progress has certainly been made. But not enough, not nearly enough.

    In Paris in 2015, nearly every nation on Earth agreed to hold warming well below 2°C and try to limit it to 1.5°C. A decade later, the world is still heading toward roughly 2.5°C or more under current trajectories, and 2024 became the first calendar year to average more than 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures. We must continue trying to reduce emissions. But we also need to confront an uncomfortable reality: a substantially hotter world is no longer a distant possibility. It is the world we now need to prepare for.

    I wish I was wrong, but I think we need to begin with the assumption that the Earth is going to become a much more unfriendly place in which to live. Elon Musk wants humans to live on Mars. I fear we will find ourselves living on “Venus” instead.

    Most of the climate discussion is still about how to stop the Earth from getting hotter. Of course we must continue trying. But since we cannot count on governments to solve this in time, we also need to ask a much more immediate question and one that can be answered on a personal basis:

    How are individual human beings going to live on a much hotter planet? My answer is something I call personal climate. Before explaining what I mean, consider the problem.

    (more…)