Author: Satyen K Bordoloi
Satyen is an award-winning scriptwriter, journalist based in Mumbai. He loves to let his pen roam the intersection of artificial intelligence, consciousness, and quantum mechanics. His written words have appeared in many Indian and foreign publications.
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…
Unbeknownst to us, the Uberization of war has already begun where cheap, everyday tech is turning the tide in battlefields finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. The top hatch of a USD 5 million T-14 Armata Russian tank is open. Above it, a tiny drone barely costing a few hundred dollars, hovers undetected, aims and drops a grenade making it explode. In other viral footage, kamikaze drones do not drop anything, instead drive themselves and thus their cargo straight into these expensive metal boxes. Tanks, one of the most potent weapons of war for over a century, have been upended by a…
Satyen K. Bordoloi outlines the damage human beings are doing to the most precious ‘thing’ in the universe: Intelligence. The ones most intoxicated by ChatGPT are Artificial Intelligence doomsayers. The Terminator and Matrix-bred humans are once again in overdrive telling us that AI is a dangerous weapon that can do incalculable harm. What these people opportunistically neglect or perhaps have never considered, is how much damage has already been done by the most dangerous species on the planet: humans. Throughout human existence, billions have died untimely from the direct or indirect actions of individuals. In the last 100 years itself,…
Awareness about deepfake videos has spread but few know the menace that audio deepfake can create in our lives writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Actor Val Kilmer had lost his voice to throat cancer in 2014. That would be a problem in reprising his role of Iceman for Top Gun: Maverick. Though he did not have to speak much, his few lines were vital. In the end, Kilmer did and did not speak, for it was an AI model that synthesized his voice after analysing hours of his archival voice. Ruth Card did not know anything about such audio deepfakes when…
The story of the first ever call from a mobile, handheld device is as exciting as whom it was made to and its violent, obscure birth finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. There are personal fetishes. Then there is mass hysteria. But exactly 50 years ago today, humanity began a ridiculous obsession with a device that has led to the most rapid changes in everything we do in the fastest time possible. Indeed, our very conception of time has been altered by it. Today, five decades ago i.e. April 3, 1973, the very first mobile phone call using a handheld telephone device,…
The fax was invented 180 years ago, smartphones are 31 years old, while the electric car has existed for nearly two centuries reveals Satyen K. Bordoloi. We are forced to remember the dates of wars and conquests. They are important no doubt, but dates that have a direct impact on our daily lives are rarely given attention. Like when technologies we use every day were invented. This leads to interesting misconceptions. We might think an invention is a certain number of years old. Turns out we missed the real date by decades or a few millennia. Here are just five…
Everyone has been talking about how great ChatGPT is at writing. But how much of it is true and what is hyped? Satyen K. Bordoloi tests it to find out. The greatest fear in everyone’s mind – fed as we are on AI doomsday scenario is that with ChatGPT getting so good at contextualising information, no job is safe from AI. Examples are given of how good it can write, how people are using it to create poems or writing screenplays. In the last two months that I have been using ChatGPT, curiosity has led me to give the model…
After years of crippling ransomware attacks, federal agencies fought back with some unique out-of-the-box solutions in 2022 finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. When the ransomware attack on AIIMS paralysed India’s premier hospital in Delhi in November last year, the Indian government finally woke up to the threat of cybercriminals. At Sify.com though, we had a ‘we-told-you-so-moment’ as we had flagged the same issue here six months ago. Yet, there is good news on the Ransomware front. As per an analysis by a blockchain company Chainalysis, “2022 was an impactful year in the fight against ransomware. Ransomware attackers extorted at least $456.8…
Due to the use of Artificial Intelligence in the taxation system in India, it is becoming harder to commit tax fraud writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Last year when the GSTN authorities in UP put the activities of traders through BIFA – an AI software to detect transactional anomalies – the name of a textile company in Hapur district came up. Despite a turnover of Rs. 25 crores, it had not deposited tax even once. The firm was using input credit from bills that had a value under Rs. 50,000 to avoid detection. The fraud had escaped human eyes, but not…