Author: Nigel Pereira

With terrorists and drug cartels having no qualms about weaponizing AI, the rest of the world will not be given a choice, says Nigel Pereira It was pretty shocking for most people last week when the headlines said the San Francisco ruling Board of Supervisors had voted 8-3 in favor of allowing the police to use robots that can kill people. However, fierce pushback and demonstrations from activists, as well as warnings about weaponizing AI from experts around the globe have forced them to take a step back, at least for now. In an almost unprecedented backtrack in Bay Area…

With a looming food crisis powered by conflict, climate change, possibility of global recession, growing food needs to be made easier Arguably one of the world’s oldest and most important occupations, agriculture in India goes back to 9000 BCE, accounts for 18% of our GDP, and provides employment to 58% of our population, while also feeding the entire country. Unfortunately, however, while most developed countries have employed robots, AI, GPS, temperature sensors, aerial images, and more to aid agriculture, India is still far behind. In addition to the fact that over 80% of Indian farmers have farms smaller than 1.08…

In the age of transhumanism, Nigel Pereira contemplates a tomorrow that welds man with machine Imagine walking up to a cashier at a supermarket and instead of a credit card or your phone you just hold your bare hand up to the card reader and the payment goes through. Would cause quite a reaction, right? Well, that’s exactly what life is like for Patrick Paumen who has a contactless payment microchip injected under the skin of his hand. The chip is manufactured by a British-Polish firm called Walletmor founded by Wojtek Paprota and is the size of a grain of…

Could you die in the virtual world, and still survive in the real one? Nigel Pereira finds out what awaits you on the other side To begin this story we need first to explain that a light novel is different from a novel or a graphic novel or a comic, and no this isn’t clickbait, the killer VR headset is 100% real, humor us for a minute. Light novels are usually Japanese, have shorter stories, and are about 100 pages long, and while they do include some illustrations they’re more of an additional feature unlike comics or graphic novels that…

Nigel Pereira explains why organisations are exploring chaos engineering, and disrupting their own chain of operations to discover the weaknesses within There were not a lot of people in 2010 who would willingly disrupt their production environments to find points of failure, but that’s exactly what Netflix did, and in doing so gave birth to the rise of Chaos Engineering. The year was 2009 and the popular OTT platform was migrating to AWS in order to support its ever-growing audience base. The problem, however, is that cloud infrastructure consists of Kubernetes, containers, microservices, and distributed cloud architecture and is far…

Nigel Pereira explores the limitless applications for superimposing computer-generated content over a user’s view of the real world You’re probably already familiar with augmented reality if you’ve watched Terminator, Universal Soldier, Predator, Top Gun, Iron Man, Avatar, and almost all the James Bond movies. Image Credit: Terminator Movie Poster In Terminator, in particular, you look through the eyes of a killer cyborg and what you see is the real world plus a bunch of other information on the screen like if the person is a friend, an enemy, a target, etc. In the Predator movie, we get to see through…

Nigel Pereira explores the technological marvel known popularly as Metaverse and finds out how ‘real’ this artificial realm is Philip Rosedale, the creator of the popular game Second Life, describes the metaverse as a three-dimensional version of the internet that’s populated with live people. That’s about as close as we’re going to get to a “nutshell” description of the metaverse. What’s interesting is that many people consider Second Life to be the first metaverse since it was the first time that social media was integrated into a 3D digital world. Similar to our post on how video games changed the…

Nigel Pereira gives us the rundown on how the geographical location of a data center can affect all subsequent aspects for the user While most people worry about RAM, storage, and processing power while setting up or renting data center space, an often-overlooked factor is the actual geographical location of the center. This is because users only care about two things, and RAM, storage, and processing power aren’t on the list. Speed and latency are the two factors that directly impact the end-user experience. If your customers are in India and your data center is in Australia, for example, whenever…

Nigel Pereira recounts the contributions of women, in the past as well as today, in pushing humanity forward in its search for truth They say behind every successful man there is a woman, and in this case, she isn’t cooking, cleaning, or doing the laundry. In this post, we’re going to talk about the women mathematicians, scientists, and engineers who are responsible for the technology that we take for granted today while rarely being mentioned or given credit for in history. In a previous post on the evolution of data centers, we briefly mentioned the subject while talking about the…

Nigel Pereira walks us through each data center ‘tier’ that is crucial when choosing a facility to host your data In our previous post on the evolution of data centers as well as our post on serverless data centers, we went through the changes in infrastructure and focused on the technology involved. This post will be different because Tiers in data centers are basically agnostic to technology and depend only on capability. Since new breakthroughs in technology continually disrupt the data center industry, in particular, Tier classifications are technology neutral and don’t come with any “minimum system requirements.” Instead, data…