Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

High costs prevent e-cycles from taking off despite India’s history as a proud cycling nation finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he explores the solutions… Across many old railway stations nationwide or covered by tall grass in unused corners of college, or perhaps even at office campuses, you will find metal girdles into which the front wheel of a cycle can be inserted and locked. Growing up in the 80s, I’d see hundreds of cycles neatly parked on such stands outside cinema halls or factories. Today they mostly survive in our nostalgia. File Photo India has always been a nation of…

But the good news is, solutions are coming hard and fast out of the woodwork, writes Satyen K Bordoloi There’s scarcely a technology that exists without an Achilles heel. Blockchain – its promise of radically transforming almost everything we do notwithstanding – has one of the biggest ‘Kryptonite’ in the tech world: its carbon footprint. As per an online tool called the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, Bitcoin with 113 megatons of CO2 annually has a carbon footprint larger than New Zealand and comparable to that of the Czech Republic, and at 204 TWh uses power more than Chile’s consumption and…

Old is gold is a cliché proven again by the oldest propaganda delivery channel deployed in the Ukraine war but not so much for the military finds Satyen K. Bordoloi In Sam Mendes’ modern masterpiece 1917 set in the eponymous year, two soldiers race against time to deliver an important message to prevent an ambush and thus the needless death of their troops. They use the oldest but secure technology to deliver the message: a hand-delivered letter. Secure tech is what the Russian army needs right now as not just their foot soldiers, but even high-ranking officials are falling prey…

The world’s most valuable company Apple – among other tech giants – wants to disrupt the healthcare market finds out Satyen K. Bordoloi as he figures out why Every ‘sick bay’ in Star Trek is surprisingly bloodless and clean, full of gadgets that detect and heal at ‘warp speed’. While most of us write this off as the overreach of science fiction, one group took it seriously: Silicon Valley technopreneurs – and none more so than Apple. In 2019, Tim Cook – CEO of Apple – made a strange assertion in an interview on CNBC, “I believe, if you zoom…

The pattern recognition power of AI is being harnessed across the world to predict crimes finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he discovers that despite their potential, these come with inherent risks The 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report sees Los Angeles in 2054 free of murders as its pre-crime bureau can predict murders. Cops arrest murderers right before they kill the victims. The absurdity explored in the film is: how can you call it murder if you’ve successfully prevented it? As with many a science-fiction narratives, much of the technology shown in the film didn’t exist at the time. However, two…

Satyen K. Bordoloi weighs in on the disparity between the perception of and the potential inherent in Artificial Intelligence The 1991 film ‘Terminator: Judgement Day’ opens with the foot of a sentient machine crushing a human skull. ‘The Terminator’ seven years earlier had begun similarly. These films, along with HAL-9000 of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ before and the ‘Machines’ from The Matrix after, have dominated our imagination about Artificial Intelligence. These films concealed a fear in us of a potential human extermination when AI finally ‘arrives’. Nonetheless, it has been over a decade since AI not only ‘arrived’ but became…

Delivering groceries within 10 minutes is no less than a technological miracle, finds out Satyen K. Bordoloi as he takes stock of the innovations that make it possible for apps to do so It cannot get faster than this. To go to the kitchen, decide, open, pour and pick snacks to go with your favourite OTT movies – at times – takes longer than 10 minutes. Yet, there are over 80 apps and services worldwide that deliver bagfuls of goodies in less than that. This flash, instant, ultrafast (can we coin a new term: ultrasuperfast delivery virus mostly began abroad…

Crypto-wars may hold the key to the fate of future wars writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Blockchain technology – be it cryptocurrencies or NFTs – is supposed to be borderless. Yet, no expert ever predicted that crypto could be an instrument of war. But that is exactly what war-hit Ukrainians and sanctions-hit Russians are suddenly hoping for: that cryptocurrencies are war-proof. This is a hollow hope. For even if cryptocurrencies are war proof they are not fluctuation-proof. Since its peak of $68,000 on November 10, 2021, Bitcoin has mostly fallen and the day the war began, the price hit the lowest…

How did robber barons get away with more than the GDP of the bottom 50 nations in this daring robbery while armed with an India connection, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi The biggest robberies and heists in the world boggle the human imagination. In Money Heist, the robbers steal a billion-dollar. What could be bigger, right? The facts of the case though are that the world’s biggest robbery, is monumentally bigger and far stranger than the best in fiction. In 2016, 119,756 bitcoins were stolen in a hack of the then-largest cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. The cost of the stolen currencies…