Victor Rozek
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As I See It: Digital Coup
September 15, 2025 Victor Rozek
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” Those dire words were spoken in the 17th century by Cardinal Richelieu, the perfect deadly blend of Church and State, who served as chief minister to King Louis XIII of France.
To maintain power, Richelieu employed eerily familiar methods notably censorship, forbidding discussion of political matters in public places, suppressing dissent and, most important, data collection. Richelieu employed a vast network of spies who gathered information on dissenters and potential enemies. Those who were …
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As I See It: Spacing Out
September 8, 2025 Victor Rozek
Computer rooms have always been somewhat problematic to build and maintain: Raised floors, 24/7 air conditioning, a reliable power supply, and, for larger installations, a backup power source. These requirements were spendy but manageable at least until the rise of AI. To put it bluntly, AI is a resource hog, addicted to excess. Its drugs of choice are land and energy.
The future of datacenters is unfolding in Abilene, Texas. There, Project Stargate is under construction, and the mega-scale OpenAI datacenter can hardly be called affordable. Its estimated cost is $500 billion. The facility includes a whopping eight million square …
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As I See It: Disruption
August 11, 2025 Victor Rozek
There was a time, not so long ago, that pursuing a degree in Computer Science would all but guarantee a good job and the opportunity for a thriving career. Tech was booming and hungry for talent. Like sporting franchises competing for players, some companies even offered inducements in the form of signing bonuses. Early in my career I was offered a signing bonus large enough to buy a new convertible. No negotiation necessary, it was simply part of the benefits package.
But the industry has changed and career IT jobs are becoming hard to find and harder to keep. Tech …
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As I See It: At Any Cost
May 12, 2025 Victor Rozek
In more innocent times, advancements and achievements in computer technology were celebrated as human advancements and achievements. Computers were perhaps the ultimate expression of humankind’s aptness for tool making; and the ability to craft tools was indistinguishable from the tool maker. But over time, that linkage gradually eroded. Now, every new development in AI technology (the tool) threatens to bring us all (tool makers) closer to becoming obsolete.
Who among us, old enough to remember, was not rooting for IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue to beat Garry Kasparov, at the time the world’s reigning chess champion, considered by many to be …
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As I See It: Lucie, Lucie, Lucie
April 14, 2025 Victor Rozek
There is a school of thought that views AI as possibly being the last invention humankind will ever have to create. The theory is that AI, particularly artificial general intelligence (AGI), will assimilate so much knowledge and reasoning skill that it will out-think, out-plan, and out-create anything mere mortals can hope to achieve.
Well, not if France has anything to do with it. There appears to be a wide disparity in the competence of AI renderings as demonstrated by the charming, but unreliable, French chatbot named Lucie. The government was recently forced to take its chatbot offline because it was …
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As I See It: From Disk, To Cloud, To Coal Mine
March 24, 2025 Victor Rozek
Back in the 1970s, my first IT job was working swing shift in computer operations. In those days disk packs were removable, and my primary task after running nightly reports was doing backups – copying the day’s updates and transactions from the live pack to the backup pack.
Nightly backups were an article of faith. They were akin to unquestioned IT doctrine. The smooth functioning of companies depended on them because they mitigated the consequences of hardware failures. Head crashes were rare but not uncommon. And when they occurred, they made a grim screeching sound that signaled data being scraped …
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As I See It: The Forgotten Ones
January 27, 2025 Victor Rozek
It was the old black-and-white photo that first captured my attention: A woman standing next to a stack of thick folders containing green-bar printer paper that stretched from the floor to just above her head. In the photo she is smiling and appears to be balancing the unsteady tower. The year is 1969, the woman is Margaret Hamilton, and she has good reason to smile.
Eight years prior, she worked at the MIT Lincoln Lab, a research and development facility funded by the Department of Defense. There, she worked on something called the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Project. MIT was …
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As I See It: Gratitude
December 2, 2024 Victor Rozek
Tech has taken a number of hits this year, and many of them were aptly deserved. The issues are well known and thoroughly documented. What is often obscured, what is often lost amid the outrage, are some of tech’s extraordinary accomplishments. They are overlooked in part because they have become the baseline for our expectations.
In the smartphone, for example, the least among us has access to more computing capacity than powered the first Moon landing. We hold a miracle in our hand, and get annoyed if our text message isn’t promptly delivered.
Imagine, for a moment, living in the …
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As I See It: The Tells
November 4, 2024 Victor Rozek
In its early incarnations, AI-generated media was often easy to spot: groups of the same people appearing multiple times in a crowd scene; multi-directional light sources in outdoor settings; mouths moving out-of-sync with the words being spoken; people whose anatomy mysteriously sprouted extra fingers or additional limbs.
But things quickly improved to the point that deepfake images and manipulated video are no longer obvious constructions. Misinformation from both domestic and foreign sources is now rampant on the Internet, especially during the election cycle and, at a glance, it’s difficult to know if what we’re seeing is real.
Which is why …
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As I See It: Unintended Consequences
September 9, 2024 Victor Rozek
In the classic movie Inherit the Wind, Spencer Tracy plays a character fashioned after Clearance Darrow in a re-enactment of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. It acquired that reductive moniker because the defendant was a teacher accused of teaching evolution.
In his closing summation Tracy, as the defense attorney, argues that there has always been a price for achieving progress. New knowledge often challenges old beliefs; progress inevitably displaces what came before; and, more often still, it leaves in its wake a wash of unintended consequences. “Mister,” says Tracy, “you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose …
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