Victor Rozek
-
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 …
Read more -
As I See It: The Forgotten Ones
January 27, 2025 Victor Rozek
It was the old black-and-white photo that first captured my attention: A woman standing next to a stack of thick folders containing green-bar printer paper that stretched from the floor to just above her head. In the photo she is smiling and appears to be balancing the unsteady tower. The year is 1969, the woman is Margaret Hamilton, and she has good reason to smile.
Eight years prior, she worked at the MIT Lincoln Lab, a research and development facility funded by the Department of Defense. There, she worked on something called the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Project. MIT was …
Read more -
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 …
Read more -
As I See It: The Tells
November 4, 2024 Victor Rozek
In its early incarnations, AI-generated media was often easy to spot: groups of the same people appearing multiple times in a crowd scene; multi-directional light sources in outdoor settings; mouths moving out-of-sync with the words being spoken; people whose anatomy mysteriously sprouted extra fingers or additional limbs.
But things quickly improved to the point that deepfake images and manipulated video are no longer obvious constructions. Misinformation from both domestic and foreign sources is now rampant on the Internet, especially during the election cycle and, at a glance, it’s difficult to know if what we’re seeing is real.
Which is why …
Read more -
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 …
Read more -
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 …
Read more -
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 …
Read more -
As I See It: Mind Hacks
May 20, 2024 Victor Rozek
When I first saw the video, it felt a bit like watching science fiction. There were rows of little children, sitting in a classroom, dressed identically, seemingly concentrating on their school work in compliant silence. It reminded me of 20th century newsreel footage of obedient Hitler youth, except that the kids were Asian. And it had a distinctly dystopian feel to it punctuated by an electronic headband on each child’s forehead.
But it wasn’t fiction. The headband monitored the children’s brainwave activity, to identify those who were concentrating and those who were not. The results were transmitted in real time …
Read more -
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 …
Read more -
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 …
Read more