Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

The Luddites – a 200-year-old anti-tech cult is raising its head in the AI age but not via loom-breaking workers, but through its very creators itself writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. If you have looked at your newsfeeds recently, you would have thought the world was close to an end. Every other day there is some technology expert hitting the panic button against Artificial Intelligence. Eliezer Yudkowsky went to the extreme writing in Time Magazine that, “Everyone on Earth will die. Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ‘that is the obvious thing that would happen.'” For…

Social media’s harmful effects on teens were highlighted again in a report from US government, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. 14-year-old Samika (name changed) from Guwahati gets no love from her family. Her father is a drunk who hits her mother who struggles with odd jobs to feed the three daughters. But she has access to social media through phones in the homes her mother works. She barely knows English but makes do with speech-to-text and other features. On Instagram, she gets chatty with a 40-year-old who lavishes her with dreams. She runs away and even when traced, refuses to come…

RBI launching the digital rupee can be a game changer for the world if the pitfalls are taken care of writes Satyen K. Bordoloi as he outlines its day-to-day applicability Beginning today (December 1), India’s central bank RBI – Reserve Bank of India – is setting out on a grand experiment that could change finance in the nation. It is launching the digital rupee (e₹) on a pilot basis with eight banks participating in the trial. The e₹ will be a digital token that will represent legal tender and will be in the same denominations that coins and paper currency…

Science is stranger than sci-fi is proven again as an idea to explain some core concepts of quantum mechanics, is leading to a theory of the future affecting the past writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. A common cultural phenomenon worldwide is to pray after a tragedy. A plane has crashed and relatives pray that their loved ones be found alive. It is counterintuitive because the accident has already taken place so logically what relatives are praying for is that their prayers would somehow travel through time and affect the past. This retroactive effect of prayers might sound stupid, almost sci-fi, but…

Biology has largely been digitized and we are at the cusp of hacking and cracking the code of life itself finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he says that humans living to 150, or more, is in the anvil. When Elon Musk introduced NeuraLink to the world, everyone gasped, few for the right reasons. Most understood its intention as connecting brain neurons so we can move things with the mind. That is a low-hanging fruit. What Musk wanted to achieve – whether he realises it or not – is the pinnacle of Digital Biology aka synthetic biology sometimes aka biohacking –…

Google finally released its ChatGPT competitor to the world but a test run by Satyen K. Bordoloi gives a mixed bag of results One of the smartest things about ChatGPT is one of its simplest: the small left panel shows a cache of past conversations. This is an invaluable tool because you can go back, reconnect with an old query and advance the conversation forward. The first thing you notice when you use the recently released for the world Google’s ChatGPT competitor Bard, is it does not have this simple feature. You close the tab and poof, everything goes. This…

When it comes to electric vehicles, the country set to change the world is India and it’s already doing so in unique ways finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. Few know that electric vehicles (EVs) were invented 200 years ago and are as old as petrol-diesel ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles. Between the 1890s and 1910s, EVs competed with ICE for US market dominance as people preferred EVs for mobility inside cities. A century later, we have a redux in the US. However, the real EV revolution is happening thousands of miles away, in India, where local ‘jugaad’ – tinkering – is…

First generative AI like Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and MidJourney, then ChatGPT and clones have woken us to the potential of AI but its full possibility will surface in the first truly zero-budget film made without a camera writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Democratization of cinema is a term used often to describe the digitization of the means of filmmaking. Everyone who has a mobile, it is said, can become a filmmaker. But anyone who has tried to shoot anything decent with a mobile knows how tough this is. And even if visuals are cinematic, how do you record flawless sound? This…

Like intelligent humans burnt at the stake in the past, the witchhunt of artificial ‘intelligence’ is afoot and shamefully led by some of our smartest people driven by some primal instincts writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Before the Age of Enlightenment, if a person had better intelligence than those around them: they faced one of two fates. If the pack found a way to use it, they would celebrate them. If they feared it because they did not understand, they would call them black magicians, and witches and lynch them. Intelligence has always inspired the opposite primitive instincts: reverence or murderous…

The internet is fast cramping up with art, content, literature, music etc. created by AI while the world is gradually filling up with gene-edited living things says Satyen K. Bordoloi. Geiger counters that measure radioactivity have a specific problem. They need iron smelted before 1945 i.e. before the first nuclear tests. Iron made since are polluted by the planet’s air rife with not much, but enough radioactivity for them not to give accurate radioactivity results. Like 1945, the 2020s have been a cut-off for almost everything else: from art and literature to culture, politics, history and even the genetic pool…