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

Category: Technology

  •    Elon Musk-the Modern Alpha Male

    Recently, I realized that my dislike of Elon Musk was interfering with my ability to acknowledge his significant accomplishment. That bothered me. I have spent much of my life working with exceptional people such as Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Ken Olsen, Bill Gates.  I thought I capable of separating my feelings about a person from my judgment of their work.

    I managed that with Steve Jobs. I met Steve when he was 25 and I was 35, and knew him in various capacities until he died. I never liked him, but I always admired him. My personal feelings did not prevent me from recognizing what he accomplished. The same thing was true of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.

    With Musk, I have found that separation more difficult. Probably it has more to do with his personality which I find very disturbing.

    The visionary autocrat

    I have never met Musk, although I know people who know him well. For instance, he would often sleep on the sofa of a close friend of mine.

    During the second half of the 1990s, when PayPal was an important internet company,  I was leading much of Intel Capital’s investment activity, with a particular focus on residential broadband and the emergence of the internet as a new medium. Others on my staff were closer to the entrepreneurs building online commerce and payments. Of the people associated with PayPal, Max Levchin was the one I knew personally.

    I left Intel and Palo Alto in 1999 to concentrate on international internet development. Looking back, I wish I had gotten to know more of that group. They went on to exercise extraordinary influence over technology and now, increasingly, politics.

    Musk belongs in the company of the great industrialists. Tesla helped make electric vehicles desirable and pushed the automobile industry to take them seriously. SpaceX demonstrated what a privately led organization could accomplish in a field long dominated by governments and their established contractors.  He helped start Open AI and continues to have a major role in AI with Grok.

    Neither of these achievements belongs to Musk alone. Thousands of engineers, managers, factory workers, and others made them possible. But assembling those organizations, attracting capital, choosing ambitious goals, and persisting through the possibility of failure are substantial accomplishments in themselves.

    Having spent decades evaluating technologies and the people behind them, I know how difficult it is to turn an ambitious idea into a functioning business. Musk has done that repeatedly.

    Like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, he fits what I think of as the visionary autocrat: someone with an unusually strong sense of what should exist and an equally strong determination to make other people build it.

    The question is what happens when that approach extends beyond a company and crosses into politics.

    The attraction of the alpha male

    Years ago, I spent two days in Rwanda visiting with the silverback gorillas. Watching the silverbacks and the behavior of the animals around them, I found myself thinking about human authority.  We share almost 99% of our genome with other primates so there is a lot to learn by observing their behavior, I think.

    But the comparison has limits. Primates have different social arrangements, and human societies are far more complicated. We cannot explain modern politics simply by pointing to our evolutionary relatives but nor should we ignore them.

    Still, the experience left me with a question: how much of our attraction to powerful leaders comes from an old desire to have someone strong protect us and impose order?

    In human society, strength takes many forms. It can mean physical force, but it can also mean intelligence, wealth, confidence, the ability to organize others, or the ability to tell a story that people want to believe. Over our evolution and particularly after the development of language, intellectual strength has overtaken physical strength.

    Musk is clearly a complex person with tremendous drive and a great tolerance for risk.  His achievements make his confidence persuasive and to some extent this feeds on itself.  When someone has accomplished things that others considered impossible, it becomes easier for them to believe that he may also have answers to questions far beyond his original expertise. And at some point, they themselves start to believe that as well.

    That is where admiration can become dangerous. Success can encourage both the successful person and his followers to stop recognizing the limits of his judgment.

    Trying to understand Musk

    To examine my own reaction, I began listening to interviews with Musk and discussions about him. An Ezra Klein interview with Quinn Slobodian led me to Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff.

    The book helped me think about Musk as more than an unusual individual. It examines the broader worldview he represents and the relationship between technological ambition, private wealth, and political power.

    I do not have to accept every argument in the book to find its central question important: what kind of society emerges when people who control powerful technologies also expect to determine how the rest of us should live?

    My own experiences in South Africa gave that question a particular resonance.

    South Africa and the experience of hierarchy

    Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971 a year after my first son was born. I first visited South Africa in 1974, when I was living in Israel and had established a medical computer business based on work I had done at the Thoraxcenter in Rotterdam.

    For someone who had participated in civil rights protests, going to apartheid South Africa was an uncomfortable decision. I justified it to myself by arguing that medical technology could benefit everyone. I also insisted on being able to visit hospitals serving black patients and brought some equipment as a personal donation.

    I fell in love with the country’s beauty and returned many times. Much later, I discovered that I had family in Cape Town.

    But the memory most relevant to this discussion is a small one.

    While staying in someone’s home in Johannesburg, a young Black servant brought tea to my room every morning at seven. I tried to engage her in conversation. She seemed surprised that I would want to talk with her. Eventually, I learned that she had to leave her village at about four in the morning to arrive in time to bring me that tea.

    Her three-hour journey was part of the machinery of someone else’s comfortable morning.

    What struck me was how little attention the white people around me appeared to give to the lives of the Black people whose work sustained their households. It was as if they did not even see them.

    I cannot know what lessons Musk absorbed from growing up in that society. Sharing a country does not mean sharing the same experience or drawing the same conclusions. But I wonder how growing up amid such an explicit hierarchy affected his understanding of power, service, and the people entitled to make decisions.

    Humanity and individual humans

    The tension I find most troubling in Musk is the distance between his concern for humanity’s future and his apparent willingness to disregard particular people in the present.

    He speaks about enormous goals: making life multiplanetary, developing sustainable energy, and addressing the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence. These are serious subjects.

    Yet accounts of his treatment of employees and people close to him, alongside some of his own public behavior, can suggest that individual dignity matters much less to him than the mission.

    He seems to care about humanity more than he cares about humans.

    That is my interpretation of his conduct. I do not know what he feels privately, and I would not claim that he is incapable of empathy although I have my doubts. But we can judge how someone treats people without pretending to understand everything happening inside his mind.

    I also recognize a difficulty here. Leadership sometimes requires decisions that hurt individuals while benefiting a larger group. Empathy does not automatically tell us how to resolve those conflicts. A leader who cannot tolerate causing anyone distress may be unable to make necessary decisions.

    But the opposite danger is at least as serious. Once someone believes his mission is essential to civilization, almost any harm can become justifiable. There is always a larger goal, a more distant future, or a greater number of hypothetical beneficiaries.

    From accomplishment to a sense of destiny

    Musk showed technical ability and initiative as a child, teaching himself programming and selling a computer game. Whether that makes him a child prodigy is less important to me than what happens when early ability is followed by extraordinary adult success.

    I know something about the gift and burden of feeling different because of one’s abilities. It can create confidence, but also isolation. It does not necessarily produce wisdom about other people. Fortunately, my mother thought me compassion.

    I wonder whether Musk’s repeated successes have encouraged him to see himself as indispensable: someone whose judgment must prevail because humanity’s future depends on it.

    I cannot know whether that is how he understands himself. But parts of his public rhetoric invite that interpretation.

    There is a considerable difference between believing you can build a better car or rocket and believing you are entitled to decide what is best for civilization. The first belief can be tested against engineering and commercial results. The second requires a kind of authority that business success alone cannot confer.

    The “woke mind virus”

    Musk’s use of the phrase “woke mind virus” is revealing.

    He uses it to describe progressive ideas that he believes encourage ideological conformity, suppress disagreement, and distort thinking about race, gender, and identity.

    There are legitimate questions to ask about intolerance and conformity in progressive institutions, just as there are in conservative ones. No political movement has a monopoly on independent thinking or on the suppression of it.

    But describing a collection of ideas as a virus changes the argument. People who disagree become carriers of an infection. Their reasons no longer need to be considered on their merits.

    For Musk, the subject also has a personal dimension. He has linked it publicly to his estrangement from his transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson. She has disputed his account of their relationship and her treatment. I do not think an outsider can resolve that family conflict, and I would not use it as a complete explanation of his politics.

    What interests me is the larger pattern: disagreement becomes a threat to civilization, and combating it becomes a mission.

    That framing leaves little room for compromise. If you believe you are saving humanity from an infection, listening to your opponents can begin to look like weakness.

    Is Musk dangerous?

    I think he is.

    My concern is the combination of his abilities, wealth, influence, and apparent certainty that he knows what the future requires.  I am so glad that the recent elections in the USA turned against his candidates and goals.

    Wealth can give someone the ability to act on a scale that would otherwise require public agreement. Control over important technologies can make governments and societies dependent on decisions made inside private organizations. A large communications platform can give its owner an exceptional role in shaping public debate.

    These forms of power deserve scrutiny regardless of who holds them.

    Running a company does not prepare someone automatically to govern a society. Employees may be expected to carry out a chief executive’s decisions. Citizens are entitled to challenge the decisions that shape their lives.

    My effort to give Musk credit has not made me comfortable with him. It has made my concern more specific. I can admire what he has helped build and still question the authority he appears to claim from those achievements.

    Perhaps the lesson of the alpha male is as much about the followers as the leader. We want someone capable to solve difficult problems. We may become so impressed by what that person can do that we stop asking what he should be allowed to decide for everyone else.

    I began this journey because I wanted to acknowledge Musk’s accomplishments more fairly. I believe I can now do that.

    I still do not want to live in a world where admiration for an exceptional individual becomes permission for him to rule.

    Musk is just 55 years old as we are about to enter the most rapid evolution of human culture ever.  I am sure he will play a significant role and I hope it will be a positive one but fear it will not.

  • Bringing  fiber internet  into a palazzo built in 1731.

    As many of you know, I played a leading role in developing the residential broadband so many of us now take for granted. From 1993 to 2000, I spent seven years working across the ecosystem, from silicon to applications. As Intel’s Corporate Vice President of Business Development, I also used Intel Capital, which I co-founded, to invest in critical startups such as Broadcom. Today, I’m bringing fiber into a palazzo built in 1731.

    In 1993, 14.4 kbps modems were a mainstream option. By late that year, you could buy a 28.8 kbps modem but you still had to find a service that could answer at that speed. There were none.

    I realized that a single channel on a cable television network could deliver 10 megabits per second. Compared with a 14.4 kbps modem, that was almost 700 times faster. There was a catch: that capacity was shared among homes. Still, even allowing for sharing, cable broadband offered an enormous improvement. For a rough comparison, let’s use 1 Mbps as an effective speed for early cable broadband. In 1996 I convinced Steve Case, AOL’s CEO, to open AOL to connections over the internet, including cable broadband. That meant customers could reach AOL through their own internet connection.

    Now, thirty years later, I’m living in the historic center of Lecce, in southern Italy, renovating a palazzo built in 1731. Today, I ordered fiber internet: up to 2.5 gigabits per second for about $30 a month.That advertised speed is 250 times the original cable modem’s 10 Mbps capacity. But fiber capacity is also shared, so comparing the headline numbers doesn’t tell the whole story.

    In the place I’m renting while the palazzo is being renovated, I have a 500 Mbps fiber plan and typically get around 200 Mbps. I don’t yet know what the new connection will deliver, but suppose I average 1 Gbps. Using those rough figures 1 Mbps then and 1 Gbps now that would be a thousandfold increase over thirty years. It works out to compounded growth of about 26% a year, or a doubling roughly every three years. Not quite the pace associated with Moore’s law, but not bad.

    I also plan to add Starlink as a backup if the fiber connection fails. An eighteenth-century palazzo, connected by fiber and backed up by satellites. Quite a journey from the dial-up days.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • My memoir, The Flight of a Wild Duck, is now free on Substack — thanks to Claude Cowork.

    https://avram.substack.com/p/the-flight-of-a-wild-duck-start-here

    It took me three years to write my memoir. The first year was spent doing research, the second writing, and the third editing. I enjoyed the process immensely.

    I had three audiences in mind while writing it. The first was people like me or parents of people like me who could not follow the normal path through life. The second was readers interested in the history of technology and the computer industry. The third was people fascinated by early-stage investing, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

    That combination made the book somewhat unconventional. But I could not really write three separate books.

    I had also intended to include a section called Lessons, one hundred short lessons, each only a page long. But by then the manuscript was already 340 pages, and I had spent three years on it. I decided instead to publish those lessons separately someday. I still intend to do that.

    The book was published in 2021. It has sold fewer than a thousand copies. I never expected it to become a bestseller, and I certainly did not write it for money, but those numbers have still been disappointing.

    I believe the book is both well written and historically valuable. After all, I was “in the room” when many of the decisions that shaped the technological world we now live in were made and often by me. I felt that part of my contribution to the future of technology was helping document its past. But if nobody reads the book, it is hard to accomplish that goal.

    I chose to self-publish rather than work with a traditional publisher because I wanted complete editorial freedom. But that also meant I had little guidance on how to market the book, and in retrospect I made a strategic mistake.

    I decided to promote it primarily through podcast interviews. Looking back, that was probably not very smart. If someone listens to an hour-long interview with me, they may feel they already know the story and no longer need to read the book. And I suspect that many podcast listeners simply read fewer books.

    Selling the book through Amazon created another barrier: people had to buy it, even though I never cared much about the monetary side. I also found Kindle Direct Publishing surprisingly unfriendly and opaque. There are people who know how to game the system and maximize visibility, but I neither understood those tricks nor wanted to spend my time learning them.

    For quite a while, I had been thinking about putting the book on Substack. I did not want it behind a subscription wall. I simply wanted the entire book available — for free. On Substack, people can share links not only to the book itself but to individual chapters. That creates at least the possibility that the book could spread organically.

    What held me back was learning the ins and outs of Substack. But yesterday, Claude Cowork and I finally made it happen. It is not perfect yet. I still want to add visuals as Claude could not move those over automatically. There are a few formatting issues. But it is already 95% of what I hoped it would be. I will fix the rest over time.

    So I am inviting you to read all or part of The Flight of a Wild Duck. And if you think it is worthwhile, I would deeply appreciate it if you shared the link with your social network and with anyone who might enjoy the story.

    https://avram.substack.com/p/the-flight-of-a-wild-duck-start-here

    Thank you.

  • The Decline and Ascension of Avram Miller

    My body is slowing down as my brain speeds up. It is quite a dilemma. It is understandable that my body would be slowing down. After all, I am 81 years old. But why is my brain speeding up? That is not to be expected. Now, I feel like I felt when I was an eight-year-old, reading a book a day as I consumed a library. Then I only had two things to stimulate my mind: books and, most importantly, my imagination. I learned by creating and by doing. I was destined to find my own way because I was incapable of following anyone else’s.

    Now, at this advanced age, I am still driven to learn and to create. Perhaps the advent of AI has set my brain once again on fire. But like my childhood when I was so ill that most of my days were spent in a bathrobe, my body cannot keep up with my brain.

    I have begun to feel tired. Not sleepy tired, but weary. While I am still strong, doing pilates and gym training four days a week, walking miles every day, and doing push-ups and planks at home, the physical energy that sustained me over all these years is dissipating. I am beginning to be at war with myself. My body wants to lie on the sofa passively, but my mind demands that I stand up and go to my computer. I still put in about 10 hours a day of what others might think of as work, but it is the struggle to do this that I am expressing, as well as the concern about how this situation will evolve.

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  • The Next Era of AI Is Personal

    Like many of you, I’m deeply immersed in learning and using AI. It’s not an exaggeration to say it has been life-changing for me.

    Right now, AI is largely synonymous with Large Language Models — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude (my current favorite), and even Grok. But I suspect that in the not-so-distant future, we’ll look back on these models the way we now look back on the first search engines and portals: Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, and AOL. Useful in their day, but just the opening chapter.

    The LLM companies are on an extraordinary roll. Yet it’s easy to forget that most of the data on the internet isn’t actually available to them likely less than 10%. LLMs are aggregators of knowledge scraped from publicly available information, supplemented by what they learn from our interactions. Powerful, but inherently limited.

    I’ve been thinking for some time about how AI will evolve, and especially how it will become more personalized. So I was excited when my good friend Nick Grouf — one of the founders and managing directors of the Alpha Edison Fund, where I’m a limited partner told me about https://onix.life/

    Onix is taking a very different approach to AI — one that focuses less on scale and more on trust. Their newly launched platform, Personal Intelligence®, flips the typical AI model on its head. Instead of relying on large, generalized systems trained on the entire internet, Onix builds individualized AI systems trained on the proprietary knowledge of specific experts. The idea is simple but powerful: rather than an “average answer,” users get guidance rooted in the thinking of an expert they actually trust.

    (more…)

  • Fiber internet in Lecce

    I decided to upgrade my internet to fiber. There is one company that does all the fiber for the city of Lecce (Open Fiber). Then there are various companies like TIM, FastWeb that “rent” the fiber. The Open Fiber people came out to bring the fiber into our home. The fiber connects to a device inside called an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) which converts the optical signal into ethernet. An ethernet cable connects that device to the router. The people that installed the fiber and ONT told me that TIM would do the next step of providing a new router and getting it to work and in the meantime my old system would continue to work. But after a few hours it stopped working.

    The result was two days without internet and multiple phone calls by various people trying to help me. Everyone we spoke to said something different including, the fiber system was not yet working, we needed a new router, everything was fine. Then finally, someone said I just had to reset the router (one of those small reset buttons you can hardly see). I did that and now everything is working and I have 500megs up and down.

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  • Brain Tech 60 years later


    There is a growing interest in coupling technology with the human brain, from devices that monitor brain activity and help relax or stimulate the mind, to the more ambitious goal of creating high‑speed connections between brains and computers.

    This year, CES in Las Vegas made it clear that brain technology is becoming one of the next major frontiers in health tech. Several companies demonstrated devices aimed at measuring, training, and enhancing mental states. CES is a show I used to attend regularly in my years as a corporate vice president at Intel, back when residential broadband was just beginning to reshape the world. Seeing this new wave of brain technology brought back memories .  

    While I helped drive the creation of today’s residential broadband, few people know that I was also a pioneer in EEG biofeedback. In 1966 I joined Professor Joe Kamiya at the University of California, San Francisco. I was twenty‑one, a hippie and jazz pianist with an unusual talent for designing electronics, and I was making ends meet as the night manager of a pizza parlor. Through a friend, Mel, who was a medical resident working with Joe, I was introduced to this scientist who had a radical idea: if people could see and hear their own brainwaves in real time, they could learn to change them.

    Joe believed that with feedback, people could learn to control their own brain states. He was right. Mel told Joe I might be able to build the equipment he needed to test this theory. Joe explained his vision and asked if I could make it work. I told him I didn’t know, but I would try and that if I succeeded, I wanted a job. He agreed.

    For the next two weeks I worked in Joe’s lab during the day and made pizzas at night. In less than a week I completed the first task, and Joe kept his promise and changed my life.  I quit the pizza parlor and joined the lab, first as a technician and later as a research assistant. Joe became my mentor, teacher, and friend. He turned a wandering musician into a scientist. Why he took that chance on me is something I still don’t fully understand.

    The equipment I built would look crude today. Brainwaves are extraordinarily faint electrical signal, only about 10 to 100 microvolts when measured at the scalp, roughly 100,000 times weaker than a AAA battery. We used around twenty electrodes attached to the head, which was messy and uncomfortable, especially with hair. I designed ultra‑low‑noise analog amplifiers using the first generation of operational amplifiers, filtered the signals to isolate different frequencies, and then digitized them with a custom‑built computer i designed and built, all in real time.

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  • My First Speech in 27 Years — And Likely My Last



    A while back, I was invited to speak at an event connected to the World Business Forum conference in Milan which was sponsored by the Italian Institute of Technology. At the time, I was beginning a relationship with the organization. Having recently moved to Italy, I was looking for a way to stay connected to technology and to contribute to the country that had welcomed Deborah and me. I also wanted an identity here that wasn’t simply “some old wealthy retired American.” IIT offered a path toward that. Recently, IIT appointed me as the first Fellow, giving me an official role at this amazing institute.

    When I was asked to speak, I immediately said yes. I thought, mistakenly, that I would be speaking on the main World Business Forum stage. I didn’t realize the talk was for a special IIT event with only about a hundred participants. But honestly, I would have accepted even if I’d known.

    Still, when I later stood inside the enormous main hall, which seats 3,000 people, I felt a pang. That was the kind of room I used to speak in regularly, many times a year. I remember finishing talks and being swarmed by people offering business cards like I was some kind of rock star.

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