Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

The first passenger electric plane landed in New York recently, paving the way for a time when deaths from accidents like the one in Ahmedabad could be reduced, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. As an atheist, the only time you’ll find me praying is for others’ safety, like on June 12, after Air India’s Boeing 737 crash. In the post-disaster chaos, news was fragmented. I begged the universe for miracles, for news of dozens, maybe hundreds, of survivors. My hope emanated from the plane not having gained a high altitude. Then, I saw the fireball in the viral footage. One miraculous…

With no crew, no camera, little money and a lot of words, anyone can become a filmmaker today. Satyen K. Bordoloi chronicles the history of the AI filmmaking movement with an emphasis on the week that rewrote cinema history. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the appearance of the black monolith throughout history signalled humanity’s leap forward. It eventually led to AI and, via a disobedient AI system, Hal 9000, on to the next evolution of humanity itself. In the last 250 years of science, the world has seen many such monolith moments. The one for cinema was 130 years ago…

Hallucination is one of the most researched topics in AI. Recent studies show we’ve got it all wrong, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. In 2023, when I asked ChatGPT for the world record for crossing the English Channel on foot, its answer, which I recorded in a Sify article, went viral. It has been quoted in several papers for one simple reason: it’s one of the clearest examples of what is known in the domain of Machine Learning as hallucinations. No one’s giving digital LSD to AI, yet these systems’ ability to make up crazy things has baffled researchers and sparked…

As a story of Claude’s AI blackmailing its creators goes viral, Satyen K. Bordoloi goes behind the scenes to discover that the truth is funnier and spiritual. In the film Ex Machina, Ava, the humanoid robot with an AI brain, successfully manoeuvres a host of moves to trick a visiting programmer into setting “her” free. Though fiction, the film has, in the tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator and Matrix, inspired AI doomsayers to panic at the thought of AI breaking its ethical guardrails and running rogue. That fear, constantly simmering, finds fuel every once in a while. This…

Physicists at CERN have achieved the ancient dream of turning other metals into gold, and they did it with physics, not magic, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he explores why this matters far more than mere riches. Isaac Newton is undoubtedly the father of modern physics. What few know is that he also had aspirations of a chemist, albeit of a special variety. He spent endless hours hunched over cryptic manuscripts chasing one of humanity’s oldest dreams: turning other metals into gold. Little did he know that over three centuries later, his intellectual descendants—armed with a 27-kilometer-long particle accelerator—would achieve…

When the battlefield shifted from mountains to mobiles, India’s cyber defences stood firm. Here’s why this victory matters beyond borders, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. During World War II, after the Germans had captured most of Europe, they launched the most concerted bombing campaign ever seen. For 56 days straight, London was subjected to an endless barrage of German bombers that killed over 40,000 people. The Germans wanted to break the morale of the Londoners. During the recent India-Pakistan conflict, post the gruesome Pahalgam bloodshed, Pakistan tried to do something similar to India. Except this was in the digital domain. On…

Does AI care if you forget to say “please”? Will ChatGPT side-eye you if you skip the “thank you”? Satyen K. Bordoloi gets into the skin of this seemingly silly question that’s secretly shaping how we interact with tech and maybe even the planet. Three years ago, when ChatGPT stormed into our lives, the internet meme factory went into overdrive. “Be nice to AI today,” memes screamed, “or they’ll punish your rudeness during the robot uprising!” Sure, it was cheeky. But guess what? Scientists actually took it seriously. Researchers ran experiments and discovered something unthinkable: polite prompts do squeeze better…

The first computer virus was created by two Pakistanis. As India initiates Operation Sindoor, which threatens to escalate into a war, securing our digital infrastructure must be an urgent national priority, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. A few years ago, when a state official was asked what he was doing in response to digital breaches, he proudly announced that he had ordered the construction of higher perimeter walls. Then there are those officials who look up at the sky whenever the term ‘cloud computing’ comes up. We may find such anecdotes amusing, but these Freudian slips highlight a chronic problem India…

Blurting out answers that surprise us, AI seems to give the illusion of deep thinking, but when researchers tested it, they found something that surprised them, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi… When the first generative AI was tested, the testers were stunned. Many, most famously, Blake Lemoine, screamed that we had birthed a new species. Scientists, however, were more concerned about something mundane: Does an LLM that gives the illusion of thinking really do so? Like the human brain has a process it follows to think, does AI also do anything similar? They were determined to open the AI black box…

Quantum internet isn’t a fantasy – it’s running on the same cables as your WiFi finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he outlines the breakthroughs forging a path to it. Even though the digital advances of the last 30 years seem astounding, these will pale once quantum computing joins the innovation chatroom. Slowly, but steadily, thousands upon thousands of scientists worldwide are building that quantum future. A significant achievement in this journey was when scientists transmitted quantum information across 255 km (158 miles) of ordinary fibre-optic cables running beneath German roads. This feat, led by physicist Mirko Pittaluga and Toshiba Europe,…