Victor Rozek
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As I See It: Upgrade Exhaustion
May 13, 2024 Victor Rozek
Several decades ago I recall seeing a 60 Minutes episode about an arms transfer (or perhaps it was a sale) of state-of-the-art American fighter jets to Israel. The interviewer traveled to the Middle East to see how Israeli pilots were adapting to the latest in American military technology. After being assured that the jet performed as advertised, the interviewer looked into the cockpit and marveled at all the screens, dials, switches, and gadgetry confronting the pilot. A deluge of supposedly useful information was available to the pilot in real time. But the sheer volume of it seemed daunting. Curious about …
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As I See It: With Deepfakes, Nothing Is Real Except The Consequences
April 15, 2024 Victor Rozek
With an election looming that promises to be conducted with snake-oil ethics, the Congress recently turned its attention from its usual dysfunctional finger pointing to hear testimony about the growing plague of deepfakes.
The usual suspects were represented, in this case Google and Meta, by a spokesman from the industry-funded lobbying group NetChoice. Not surprisingly, they wrapped themselves in the First Amendment and accepted little or no responsibility for what their users post online. They argued that existing laws governing fraud and harassment were sufficient to protect targets (aka victims) of deepfakes.
Standing against the “it’s-not-our-fault” brigade was the mother …
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As I See It: Doctor AI
February 26, 2024 Victor Rozek
AI has been getting a lot of press and chatter lately, its vast potential for good and ill spawning prodigious debate. It’s not surprising that a technology predicted to impact 40 million jobs engenders a wide range of possible outcomes. But whether the future tilts toward transformational or apocalyptic depends, in part, on which profession is doing the assessment.
One of the more ardent transformationalists is Eric Topol. To say Topol is over-accomplished would be an understatement. He is a cardiologist, a scientist, and an author. In his spare time he became the founder and director of the Scripps Research …
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As I See It: The Other Eight Hours
January 29, 2024 Victor Rozek
In 1594, Philip II of Spain issued a royal edict establishing an 8-hour workday for construction workers in the Spanish colonies. As far as we know, there were no time restrictions on pillaging.
It took another 223 years for the notion of an 8-hour workday to find a supportive voice in England, albeit not a royal one. Robert Owen was something of an oxymoron in his day. He was both a textile manufacturer and a social reformer. As early as 1810 he proposed and instituted a 10-hour workday in a Scottish cotton mill. But by 1817 he had revised his …
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As I See It: Riffing On Retirement
December 11, 2023 Victor Rozek
It didn’t take long after my father retired for him to start getting bored. There were suddenly lots of unstructured hours to fill and no prescribed way to fill them. So, he did what many retired men do: He stayed home and annoyed his wife. But after several months of straining my mother’s tolerance for togetherness, he settled on a novel solution.
The back of our property was bordered by a very tall hedge which shaded portions of the lawn. During the rainy season the shaded areas never fully dried and became saturated. So my father decided to replace patches …
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As I See It: Elusive Connections
November 27, 2023 Victor Rozek
Between the ages of 2 and 6, I formed a deep attachment to a small stuffed bear. I played with it, talked to it, and slept with it. It was my constant companion and before I moved on in my development, I had loved much of its fur off.
America, according to mental health experts, is experiencing a loneliness epidemic. On a planet straining with the weight of 8 billion people, it seems that an uncanny number lack meaningful connection. A problem not likely to be solved by embracing stuffed animals.
In a study commissioned by healthcare/insurance giant Cigna, “more …
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As I See It: Luddites
October 30, 2023 Victor Rozek
Having enjoyed a life of relative plenty, it’s easy to give myself more credit for the abundance I take for granted than I actually deserve. I habitually forget that almost everything I own, eat, drive, and wear was produced by someone else, often at great cost.
I had that thought recently as I looked at my iPhone, a miracle of technology, designed domestically, but assembled in foreign mega-factories by people whose range of choices is infinitely more limited than mine. I recalled something horrific that happened over a decade ago in a Chinese Apple assembly plant run by a Taiwanese …
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As I See It: IT Come Home
September 25, 2023 Victor Rozek
Wanna buy a skyscraper, cheap? Need an extra million square feet of space to store your stuff? Want enough living space for you and 600 of your closest friends? No problem. In large and mid-sized cities across the country, once-robust downtowns are looking a bit gaunt. Storefronts are shuttered, restaurants are struggling, and once-thick downtown traffic has noticeably thinned. And for that, you can thank, or blame, technology.
Specifically, the technology that allowed so many of us to work from home during the Covid years. We got spoiled, enjoying unprecedented flexibility, freedom, independence, and convenience. No commute, no set hours, …
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As I See It: Focus
August 7, 2023 Victor Rozek
I heard a startling statistic the other day: The average American worker is only able to concentrate for three minutes at a stretch without interruptions – most of them self-inflicted. That seemed hyperbolic at first, and equally exaggerated when the stat floated through my brain later that same evening. Surely, that can’t be true; and it certainly didn’t apply to me.
At least that’s what I thought until I realized while I was pondering the demise of the American attention span, I was also watching a Netflix series on TV while simultaneously gorging on YouTube news clips playing on my …
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As I See It: Chasing Eternity
July 17, 2023 Victor Rozek
When I was a kid, my parents enrolled me in a parochial grammar school. One day, my teacher was expounding on the joys of spending eternity in heaven. I didn’t know much about eternity – or heaven for that matter – except that eternity seemed like a very long time. So, I raised my hand and asked her what heaven was like, what would I spend all that time doing? She thought for a moment, no doubt straining to conjure a simple answer that an eight-year-old might understand.
Then she said, “Imagine your very favorite thing to have for dinner. …
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