Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Satyen K. Bordoloi builds a case for India to develop autonomous vehicle technology to benefit 83 per cent of the world Two American TV series were popular with kids who grew up in the pre-cable TV 1980s India: Street Hawk and Knight Rider. Both – one a bike, the other a car – involved self-driving vehicles that fought and prevented crime. I remember dad making a joke about why Knight Rider can never be set in India: stuck in traffic they’d reach only after the crime was done. As self-driving vehicles – from cars, trucks, and drones to ships come…

While we were busy with Artificial Intelligence, CRISPR or Artificial Gene Editing, quietly threatens to irrevocably transform our physical world, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi When the history of our present is written 50 or 100 years from now: two things will stand out. First being how great strides in gene editing technology with its potential to transform the physical world were happening at the same time as the developments in the digital space. Secondly how the general public was hyper about one but almost entirely ignorant of the other. Maybe the reason is terminology. Artificial Intelligence or AI, seems such…

After crying while looking at its first photos released by NASA, Satyen K. Bordoloi pens a love letter to what itself is a paean to human ingenuity and imagination – the James Webb Space Telescope Dear James Webb Space Telescope, When NASA released the first images it reconstructed from your data on July 12, the meme-makers went on overdrive. Images comparing the clarity of your image next to Hubble’s, made the rounds. A joke crept up in my mind as well: at $10 billion you were the most expensive camera upgrade ever. https://twitter.com/panini_singam/status/1546633068252995590 https://twitter.com/minskycharlotte/status/1547010999890640896 Perhaps the most famous meme of…

How does the mind-brain problem apply to the domain of artificial intelligence? Satyen K. Bordoloi finds out Scientists in China have breached another scientific milestone with regard to the physical infrastructure of Artificial Intelligence. A South China Morning Post article reported that Chinese scientists have been able to run an artificial intelligence model as sophisticated as the human brain on their most powerful supercomputer, the Sunway. The team used the Sunway machine to train an AI model called bangualu (alchemist’s pot) with 174 trillion parameters which are more than the number of synapses believed to be in the brain. This…

Six nations are flying off to the Moon in a year finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he discovers six reasons for this sudden rush and also India’s role in this stampede Though films had been made for seven years before, cinema truly began only after Georges Méliès’ 1902 masterpiece: A Trip to the Moon. At a time when flying hadn’t even been invented, no one could imagine that barely 57 years later humans would land a mission on the Moon. Yet, like the before and after of Méliès’ film, the real, deeper exploration of the Earth’s lunar satellite would only…

The world’s first self-driving AI cargo ship completed a 500-mile journey with 99% autonomy, while similar cars on land struggle to achieve much less. Satyen K. Bordoloi looks under the bonnet to tell you why, and when you can expect to buy a fully-autonomous car In the 2004 film I, Robot, Will Smith abhors robots. After an accident where two cars fall into a river, instead of saving a little girl’s life like he asks the robot to do, its AI brain calculates a higher probability of saving him, so it abandons the girl. His dichotomy: he should love robots…

Before we have even launched 5G mobile technology, 6G is already making a splash and threatens to change the world beyond recognition, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Technology is developing at such a breakneck speed that before we even get used to a new product, something better arrives on the market. 5G is yet to roll out with parts of the world still reliant on 2G and 3G, yet 6G i.e., the sixth-generation wireless communications technologies supporting cellular data networks, is slated to transform the world further still. For previous generations, the key differentiator was speed. 3G started getting close to…

Genetic sequencing and editing, from the realm of science fiction less than a quarter-century ago has turned real with a vengeance, leaving the human race unprepared for its consequences finds out Satyen K. Bordoloi In the highly underrated 1997 film Gattaca, the protagonist named Vincent Freeman is – ironically – not free. But it is not the social externalities such as the colour of his skin, his station of birth, or his position in class hierarchy that cause him to suffer discrimination, but rather it is his genetic code. In this not-so-distant future, designer babies whose genes are altered before…

AI has come alive: has been the refrain of the world after a Google researcher claimed so. But has it really, wonders Satyen K. Bordoloi as he delves into the reasons for our sentient AI fetish “It’s alive! It’s alive!” These portentous words from the 1931 movie Frankenstein best captured the singular sentiment about Artificial Intelligence the entire past week. This was prompted after a Google employee Blake Lemoine was so flabbergasted by the responses of LaMDA – a language mode AI – to his questions that he went rogue and released his interactions to the world. Google, on their…

Marvel films have changed dramatically since their origin as a sci-fi genre, turning away from science to embrace magic and fantasy says Satyen K. Bordoloi who tells us that what is good for the franchise may not be so for the world In the 2008 film Iron Man, after Tony Stark gets inside his suit for the first time, he decides to test it. Jarvis, his Artificial Intelligence assistant, complains since there are terabytes of calculations remaining before an actual flight. But Stark says, “Jarvis, sometimes you gotta run before you can walk.” That line was prophetic because fifteen years…