Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

In a desperate race for energy, Silicon Valley is resurrecting the nuclear industry. But rushed projects and relaxed regulations are creating a perfect storm for a disaster that could make Chernobyl look small, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi It isn’t just the old; the young are equally ignorant about the tech they use. A few months ago, a Gen Z individual who couldn’t peel his eyes off his phone explained cloud computing: “The data rests in some stratospheric satellite; perhaps Starlink?” Here’s the spoiler: your data, everything from your Instagram feed to the anytime, anywhere email, is stored and retrieved from…

For decades, they followed. Now, armed with AI, as Indian pharma companies take steps to lead, the global drug industry will never be the same again, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. India is renowned as the ‘pharmacy of the world’. And that’s not just because we produce 60% of the world’s vaccines, or because we are the globe’s largest providers of generic medicines that save hundreds of millions of lives with our affordable doses. No! We are also called that because we are an emerging leader in biopharmaceuticals with over 3,000 pharmaceutical companies and approximately 10,500 manufacturing units, including 650 US-FDA-compliant…

On one side is AI swallowing millions of jobs, and on the other is humans being hired to clean up the nonsense AI often generates, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi This was early 2023, a few months after ChatGPT had just made the perfect superintelligence landing in our lives. A producer friend, who wanted a beat sheet of a series written into a synopsis, sent me a document he said he had gotten written. A reading of its first paragraph was all it took to identify the writer: ChatGPT. The perfect robotic structure, excessive and often misplaced adverbs and adjectives, and…

A theory about human intelligence formulated over four decades ago could provide the way for artificial general intelligence, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Every technological leap births its own mythology: visions so dazzling it blurs the divide between reality and fantasy. Nuclear power promised electricity “too cheap to meter.” Electric vehicles would run on batteries that could run coast-to-mountain without a recharge. The Internet was to democratize knowledge. And the most audacious techno myth is in the field of AI, that of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI – a hypothetical superintelligence so vast and godlike that not only would it outthink…

In an age where even politeness emits CO₂ and every AI query becomes part of the bigger climate story, transparency is the key to saving the planet, and AI, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi When Sam Altman gently suggested that users stop saying “thank you” to ChatGPT because every extra query burns energy, what he was suggesting is that, in the age of artificial intelligence, even politeness has a carbon footprint. Does this mean we’ve come to a point where we’ll be forced to ration our gratitude? Not necessarily. What is necessary, though, is that with the scaling up of AI…

What you see is not what you get when it comes to digital eyewear, as Satyen K. Bordoloi profiles their evolution and future in the age of AI. In 2018, while writing a film about a blind detective, I conjured her being able to do detection with the help of smart glasses with AI in them. The spectacle is equipped with AI, a camera and a RADAR that relays everything it sees and senses – like distance, to her ears. In a crunch situation around the midpoint, she even drives a car. Being five years before the Generative AI revolution…

Life is full of people who disagree with you, but AI turning into a validation machine will have potentially dangerous consequences for humanity, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi When a man asked ChatGPT 4 to help him develop his business idea of selling ‘shit on a stick’, the chatbot thought it was “absolutely brilliant” that “It’s not just smart – it’s genius.” And advised “$30k could easily launch this into the stratosphere.” It is this answer that went viral ‘into the stratosphere’. Why? Because it was really shit on a stick. That response, along with numerous other users’ experiences with chatbots,…

A new research report by MIT is giving the corporate world nightmares, but Satyen K. Bordoloi reads between the lines and finds that the ‘shadow AI economy’ is where the real AI story lies. I have been taking formal and informal talks about AI since 2019. Back then, I had to trigger interest in people about AI. These days, I’m approached to share my insights. The miracle happened after November 2022 when ChatGPT launched. In recent talks I have had with people, including one with the staff of different consulates in Mumbai, one fact has become apparent to me: everyone…

Tesla talks potential, Boston Dynamics’s videos wow, but it is a Chinese company, Unitree, that just put a real, capable humanoid robot on sale for less than $6,000, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he heralds the age of accessible robotics. On January 1 this year, when I stated in a piece that robots would be available to buy on shelves this year, a friend shot back at what he called ‘my imagination’. He didn’t deny it would happen; he just believed it was years away, if not decades. He quoted Morgan Stanley numbers, which had estimated in 2024 that a…

The two most chaotic forces in modern science – artificial intelligence and quantum mechanics – may be humanity’s best hope for solving our greatest challenges, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi When physicists associated with LIGO – Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in the US – gave AI a problem to solve, they weren’t expecting miracles. The goal was to redesign the world’s most sensitive gravitational wave detector to hear even fainter whispers from the cosmos. The AI’s first response was an asymmetrical mess with hundreds of components and a bizarre three-kilometre-long ring bolted between parts of the interferometer. However, the team, as…