Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Scientists have reversed advanced heart failure in animals using gene therapy, giving hope to what many believe will happen soon: living 120 to 150 productive years, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Ray Kurzweil, the world’s most renowned futurist, has made accurate predictions about technology more times than most. He foresaw the triumph of computers over humans in chess, the exponential increase in computational power inversely proportional to cost, and the global exchange of information via what we now know as the internet. Among his many predictions, two are yet to materialize: singularity by 2045 and immortality by 2030. At 76, Kurzweil…

An AI has been put on the ballot in the UK; two more are out there. What does this mean for politics and AI, and could we have an AI President or PM soon, asks Satyen K. Bordoloi. Those of us who report on AI, especially the trend of anthropomorphisation of AI, saw this coming. That it came under 2 years of generative AI bursting into the world, is quick. In the soon-to-be-held elections in the UK, a candidate has put his own AI avatar in as a candidate on the ballot. Though it sounds like a gimmick, this could…

Like AI today, Metaverse and Crypto were hyped a few years ago but didn’t live up to it. Satyen K. Bordoloi scrutinises AI to see if it has, or can. Two years ago, buoyed on successfully defeating a pandemic, the world was riding high on two technologies: Metaverse and Cryptocurrencies. The number of online and offline publications dedicated to crypto had never been seen for any technology as every Tom, Wick and Sally claimed crypto would change the world. The Metaverse so enthused Facebook, that they renamed themselves Meta and have spent above $46 billion while generating just $6 billion.…

Apple joined the AI bandwagon by integrating OpenAI’s offering in their operating system, but is it the right approach, asks Satyen K. Bordoloi as he analyses if this is the iAI we’ve all been waiting for. On October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer. However, a day earlier he had overseen the launch of Siri, which Jobs wanted to be more than a voice on all Apple products. What is a voice without a brain? But as I have argued earlier, Jobs was hedging his bets on developing AI to go with Siri. Siri was always supposed to be…

The cliché that the world needs more power, finds original solutions; some border on the fantastic, others – absurd, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Talking of the world needing more energy, we only think of consumer devices – laptops, mobiles, tablets etc. What we don’t realise is that, increasingly, all these devices run on things that run on systems hundreds to thousands of miles away. Endless data farms today house everything from data centers for your photos and documents to the information that’s guiding you out of a traffic jam via a mapping app. This backend, from data servers and farms…

Sometimes, the wizard behind the cool AI trick isn’t a silicon-drenched algorithm, but flesh and goo humans. Satyen K. Bordoloi goes behind the scenes of this hilarious, and all too human phenomena. Elizabeth Holmes, wearing Steve Jobs-style jeans and turtlenecks, promises to revolutionize medicine. Her ‘revolutionary’ finger prick device, Edison, runs a battery of tests quickly and with just a few drops. People are wowed until they discover that Holmes is running the tests on her competitors’ old-fashioned machines behind the scenes. Edison turns out to be all smoke and mirrors, a pseudo-tech rather than a revolutionary one. Holmes is…

OpenAI’s introduction of memory to ChatGPT is set to fulfil a key promise of AI – personalization for everyone, potentially creating a trillion-dollar industry, writes to Satyen K. Bordoloi. A friend’s mother suffers from dementia. She is physically healthy, but her mind is gradually erasing everything, even her husband, who now seems like a stranger to her. The pain this causes her loved ones is immense, as she’s physically present but mentally absent. We construct our lives on the foundation of memories. Losing them means losing the essence of life, awareness, and consciousness. Life starts to come apart, when we…

Parents often hand mobile devices to their children, inadvertently exposing them to sexual exploitation and abuse that could ruin their lives, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Before the advent of mobile and the internet, parents had simple yet strict rules for their wards. They were told not to talk to strangers or accept anything, no matter how enticing, from them. They were taught to look both ways while crossing the road and never to venture into unfamiliar places. Today, toddlers are given mobiles before they can even grasp their parents’ fingers. This means that by their teens, they’ve done everything that…

Generative AI creation apps have come to life with OpenAI’s Sora and besides other things, it is slated to change cinema beyond recognition writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. It was – perhaps still is – the most expensive action sequence ever, better than the seminal bullet-time of its prequel Matrix. Called the Burly Brawl scene from Matrix Reloaded, Neo fights an army of Agent Smiths. Because it is set in the matrix where Neo can defy laws of physics, besides martial arts chops, that scene has unbelievable camera work. The only problem: most of that scene was shot in a special…

Would you carry nuclear batteries in your phone if you didn’t have to charge it ever asks Satyen K. Bordoloi as he goes into the history of a destructive technology whose constructive use as batteries – for mobiles to spaceships – threatens to change everything. The humanoid robot Terminator T100 played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the famous franchisee, does not need to recharge. It runs on two powerful, palm-sized batteries. For the last few decades, scientists have desperately been trying to make the science fiction of a battery small yet powerful enough to run a big machine which does not…