As I See It Archives

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: 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: 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: 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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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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