Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

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,…

When UPI died, India held its breath, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi as he digs into the inside story of a nation held hostage by a QR code. Back in the early 2000s, a young, over-caffeinated version of me worked at a startup that dreamed of letting you buy cigarettes with a Nokia 3310. Our genius plan: link your phone to your bank account via SMS. Back then, this felt as revolutionary as inventing fire for the digital realm. Of course, smartphones with internet would become the norm with the iPhone since 2007 and crash our innovation party. But fast-forward to…

A teenager avoiding tedious tasks writes an AI algorithm that discovers millions of space objects, earns him a quarter of a million, and demonstrates the immense power of even small AI, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. 18-year-old Matteo Paz is a typical teenager. Hence, when he landed a fancy high school internship at Caltech and received 200 terabytes of infrared data from NASA’s NEOWISE telescope, he reacted as any teen would: he began racking his brain to figure out how not to do it and yet somehow do it. Instead of suffering through manual sorting like most interns would, Paz created…

While some hail it as a marvel of genetic engineering, others cry foul, questioning the very validity of the science behind the de-extinction of the Dire Wolf. This has profound implications for life itself, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. A new phrase must be coined for this unique moment: “de-extinction level event”, mirroring the opposite that is a staple of both cinema and science. Last year, the world heard sounds not heard on the planet for over 12,000 years: the call of a Dire Wolf, a species that went extinct before ‘civilisation’ was even a concept humans knew. This was announced…

Google is on a quest to give AI a body, and in doing so, might also do the reverse i.e. figure the perfect brain for every robot out there, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi I remember when Google was just another scrappy startup, rejected by Yahoo and struggling to find its footing. No one could have predicted that this little company would go on to reshape our entire digital universe, pioneering page ranking, navigation, translation, and eventually the planet-altering transformers paper that gave birth to generative AI. Google has been the main author of our digital lives and existence. And now,…

From AI in toothbrush to another in your shaver – India’s AI obsession has crossed peak absurdity; after all, who needs common sense when you can have artificial intelligence says Satyen K. Bordoloi Indians living in India may not have invented AI, but our genius marketers know how to sell it.. in everything. They’ve made your toothbrush smarter than you, given your shaver trust issues, and enabled your washing machine so much that it can moonlight as a therapist. Welcome to India’s golden age of AI-washed nonsense, where your pressure cooker won’t just cook you a meal but serve your…

In the shadows of artificial intelligence, a hidden agenda lurks. Can we unmask it before it’s too late, wonders Satyen K. Bordoloi Although people believe that a self-aware AI will end the world, researchers know more mundane stuff could do it. The “Paperclip Maximiser” thought experiment postulates that given the goal of maximising the production of paperclips, an AI will relentlessly pursue it at the expense of humans and the planet, turning everything into a means for paperclip creation, effectively ending the world. Obviously, we won’t let that happen. But what if an AI system has one stated intention on…

If most of our work happens in the digital domain, why should our assistants only be flesh and blood analogues, asks Satyen K. Bordoloi Back in 2021, when I began claiming in my writings that assistants like Jarvis in Iron Man are a matter of ‘when,’ not ‘if,’ people would laugh. “All that remains is for us to have affairs with a digital girlfriend like in Her,” their reply would mock. My earnest answer of “yes” would leave them in stitches. I don’t blame them. Generative AI hadn’t yet hit the market, and our AImagination was in the pits. However,…