Victor Rozek
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As I See It: The Surgical Years
March 16, 2026 Victor Rozek
Should you be lucky enough to live so long, you will enter what I call “The Surgical Years.” Inevitably, regardless of how much kale you eat, or exercise you get, or protein drinks you guzzle, your body will betray you and you will require serious medical intervention. That poses a two-pronged dilemma for millions of people: cost and availability.
Insurance premiums and co-pays are skyrocketing. Out of network care is often simply unaffordable. Rural hospitals are closing, medical appointments, particularly with specialists, are often unavailable for months. Many people are forced to ignore nagging pains until their condition becomes unbearable, …
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As I See It: What’s Past is Prologue
January 12, 2026 Victor Rozek
Imagine working as a sailmaker in the 1830s. You apprenticed as a young boy and now, in your mid-40s, you work with dozens of highly skilled tradesmen to produce the motive power for fleets of whalers, fishing boats, coastal and global trading vessels, and naval frigates.
Your work is considered essential. It fuels trade, exploration, transport and defense. To outfit a single large ship, the amount of canvass required could span three-quarters of an acre. The lives of sailors depend on the quality and craftsmanship of your labor. Since the mid-16th century your profession has been secure, respected and – …
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As I See It: Artificial Integrity
December 1, 2025 Victor Rozek
I don’t remember it being taught in school. Through high school and college I cannot recall a single instance where the concept of integrity was discussed or even mentioned. Occasionally I heard words like “honest” and “honorable” applied to virtuous historical figures. But those concepts describe behavior. Integrity, on the other hand, is based on character, on a commitment to consistently practice those virtues. Integrity drives behavior but it denotes more than action; it denotes essence, a state of being whole, and ethically unabridged.
Honor is about what you do; integrity is about who you are. Which is why a …
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As I See It: Retirement Challenges
October 13, 2025 Victor Rozek
If you work long enough, eventually you’ll earn the right not to work. Well, maybe. Retirement has become an increasingly tricky proposition. The three-legged stool designed to support the financial weight of life beyond employment is collapsing. For millions of workers approaching retirement, the support once provided by pensions, personal savings, and social security is no longer reliable. Once thought to be constructed of sturdy oak, the stool now resembles something patched together with balsa wood and duct tape.
For most workers, pensions are either a distant memory or an abstraction. According to figures compiled by everyone’s “favorite” research assistant, …
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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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