• 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: 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: 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: 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: Sainthood

  August 5, 2024 Victor Rozek

  I’ve been pondering sainthood lately. Not my own, just to be clear, but rather the concept and qualifications for such a venerable designation. The most notable modern-day example would doubtless be Mother Teresa who, after a lifetime of service and sacrifice, was canonized in 2016.

  The Catholic Church holds the franchise for saintly designations with over 10,000, many of whom were martyred for their faith. But it was the newest entrant who caught my attention. His name is Carlo Acutis, and he died in 2006 of acute leukemia at the tender age of 15. I have to admit he beat …

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• As I See It: Communication Fail

  July 22, 2024 Victor Rozek

  If there is one frequently overlooked source of workplace discontent it involves the quality of communication. Or the lack of it. On a corporate level, pronouncements seem predictably boilerplate lacking authenticity if not veracity, more suited to limiting liability than guiding behavior. Everyone, for example, touts their commitment to customer service. But customers must often navigate draconian phone trees and endure excessive wait times before being connected to a helpful human.

  The disconnect between what is said and what is experienced is based on two sets of competing values: Professed Values, and Operational Values. Professed Values are the ones companies …

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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: 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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