• 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: 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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• As I See It: Greetings, Comrade IT Professional

  April 17, 2023 Victor Rozek

  During the Covid pandemic a phrase was popularized and became widely used as an acknowledgement and an expression of gratitude: Essential Workers. Nurses and doctors topped the list, but it soon expanded to include many occupations previously taken for granted: farm workers, truck drivers, supermarket employees, garbage collectors, and others who were finally receiving acknowledgement for just how essential their jobs actually were. Beyond their contributions to stabilizing a shaken nation, workers became “essential” simply by virtue of the fact that their jobs could not be performed from home.

  Which may be why IT professionals didn’t make the list. Regardless …

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• As I See It: AI-AI-O

  March 13, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Unless you think encouraging people to eat glass is a good thing, or you happen to revel in being compared to Hitler, you probably weren’t all that impressed with the recent Big Tech AI roll out. To say it was unimpressive would be a kindness. Arguably, it was a grade A, prime time, gold-plated disaster.

  Take Meta Platform’s online tool Galactica. Please. It was quickly yanked offline when, according to The Washington Post, “users found Galactica generating authoritative-sounding text about the benefits of eating glass, written in academic language with citations.” I have to admit, the citations were …

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• As I See It: On the Chopping Block

  February 20, 2023 Victor Rozek

  I remember the first time I witnessed someone getting fired. He was called into his manager’s office where a short, occasionally animated, conversation ensued. By the time he got back to his desk, two security guards took his badge and keys, handed him a cardboard box, told him to pack his belongings, and escorted him out of the building. No goodbyes, no parting words, no well wishes from colleagues. Though he had worked there for some years, in the end he was as disposable as a used Kleenex.

  I thought about him recently as Tech sector headlines reported massive layoffs. …

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