From the Moon Landing to AI: A Boomer's Front-Row Seat to Change.

The Last Boomers

I was born in 1964, the last year of the baby boom, a latecomer to my own generation. My parents were the Silent Generation, the war children, who looked up to the Greatest Generation, the people who had won the war. They were loving parents, and my youth was as good as I could have imagined. 

They taught me three things I still live by: how to look after myself, how to live by my core values and stand up for them, and how to find real joy in people and in simple things. The first shows in my life. I have never been unemployed or dependent on others, and I have no debts. Soon most of the boomers will be gone, and I want to say what it was like before the story goes quiet.

A world that arrived in our living room

Before I understood it, I was watching a war on a black and white television. Vietnam ran from 1963 to 1973 and arrived in our living room every day. In 1967 came the Six-Day War, and in 1969 I saw the moon landing live. It is different when you watch it as it happens. Then the Yom Kippur War of 1973 led to the oil crisis, whose fallout reached Latin America and Africa. We grew up in the Cold War, with Russia as the threat and the Middle East as permanent trouble. 1990 was not the end of history, and the old ideological divides are still with us. A small boy in Holland learned that events far away change what is possible at home.

My best friend through my whole youth was Hans. After school we played outside with one rule: be back before dinner. No supervision. No mobile phones. We built things with no budget at all, working on bicycles and later mopeds, listening to rock music, and exploring the forest and the trees around us. Our neighbours were tattooed Holocaust survivors, and living next to them taught me that history is a person who waves at you over the fence.

The 1970s brought the programmable calculator and the pocket calculator, and a quieter revolution too: cheap air fares. For the first time, distance stopped being a wall.

At 16, I took a job at the Venezia Ice parlour to pay for my projects and my travel. Behind the counter I found my superpower: selling the small cones fast and getting people to hurry up. Serving at the tables was another matter. I had no patience for the bizarre attitudes of the customers. I was also no profit centre, because I made mistakes on purpose so that I could eat them. My boss was on to me, and I never got away with any nonsense. It was my first lesson in turning a negative into a positive, even if only a cone at a time.

The job paid for the door the airlines had opened. I spent three months with my cousins in Los Angeles. I discovered boogie boarding. I hiked into Havasu Canyon in the Grand Canyon National Park, often on my own. At night I slept on my mat and heard the horses of the Havasupai running through the cool dark.

Havasu taught me something Holland could not. There was no ambulance, no hospital and no fire service within 100 kilometres. If something went wrong, the only help was me. In a small, wealthy country you can go a whole life without learning that. I learned it in a canyon, and I have never forgotten it.

Havasu taught me self-reliance. The 1980s taught me how to judge a tool. Our family got its first IBM PC, and I have not typed on a typewriter since. I was an early adopter, and for one reason only: function. The PC made writing easier, and spreadsheets made calculation easier. In 1992, I first used the Internet, in the computer lab of the European University Institute, which had a direct connection to CERN, where the web was born. It followed the same logic. I have never cared about a gadget for its own sake. I care about what it lets me do.

The years the world's centre moved east

The 1990s redrew my own map as well as the world's. In 1994 I married for the first time. A few years afterwards, I felt constrained and unhappy, and I was put down. Because of that marriage I lived in Central America for ten years. I approached the world as a European and was never fully immersed, but it left its mark. I also withdrew. I isolated myself and did not interact enough with the people around me, and that is a regret.

In 1996 Hans died, the friend with whom I had built everything from nothing.

On the last day of 1999 the Panama Canal passed into Panamanian ownership. I watched this with my best friend since university days, Sander, who also has a strong interest in global affairs. In Central America it felt like a moment of hope, even though the consequences of the civil wars were still waiting to be dealt with, long after the peace treaties of the 1990s. It was also proof that the United States can sometimes do something right, once, as the old saying goes, it has exhausted the alternatives.

On 11 December 2001 China joined the WTO. We remembered the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, and we did not understand that China would become the world's producer of almost everything, including high quality and luxury goods. We also believed it would grow more democratic, more like us. It did not. It was the start of the Asian Century, the economic centre of the world moving east, and our Cold War generation was slow to see it.

In 2003, living in Costa Rica, I got a mobile phone, and in 2007, in Maastricht, a BlackBerry. Here the functional test cut the other way. I am an organised person and rarely need last-minute coordination on the fly, so the phone was not very useful to me. Being early does not mean adopting everything.

AI and the next fifteen years

In 2012 I married again and felt free, happy and part of a team with a shared mission. That same year I began working and living in Papua New Guinea, and later served as Vice-Chancellor there. It changed me, and it did so because of its deep humanity. The ugly things were there, the riots, the tribal fights, the extremely violent police action. So were the beautiful ones, and both were present and visible every day. Nothing was hidden. Papua New Guinea sticks to your skin, and there is no way it does not change you. It is where I had the most impact on people. Since then, improving education systems has been central to my life. The canyon lesson came back: when order thins out, you are responsible for yourself.

Then came AI. There has been hype since 2022, but for my own work the models became truly useful only in the first quarter of 2026. We all have to work out how to use AI as a thinking partner rather than as an assistant that makes many mistakes. I use it to push back on all my ideas, and to do a lot of my research and editing. It make me 3 to 10 times more productive. I drafted this post with an AI as a thinking partner, which is exactly the point. It would never have existed without it.

What people also miss is that these models improve exponentially, not steadily. Remember the Persian king and the chessboard. The inventor of the game asked for one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, doubling every time. The king laughed at the modesty of the request. By the last square, the doubling had produced more grain than his kingdom could ever grow. For a long time the numbers look harmless. Then they do not.

Today's war with Iran is one more round of what we have seen before: endless Middle East conflict leading to an energy crisis. AI is the part that is new.

My generation watched the world change in real time. It made us aware that the wider world can reach into your life and narrow or widen the options you can choose from. Two lessons came out of that.

1. Turn every negative into a positive.
2. Take the opportunity. Fear freezes, and hesitation kills.

I hope to have another fifteen years of great energy, and I will dedicate them to making a positive impact on education. The sector is overdue for transformation, if not reinvention, yet it resists change so stubbornly that many technology companies avoid dealing with schools and universities. That is the challenge, and it is why the work matters. The stories I can tell are all relevant to our contemporary reality. What I learned from them, I hope you can see in how I behave and think.

When did you become aware that the world is both large and diverse, and incredibly interconnected? Tell me in the comments.