Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

It would seem that the much-feared death by AI prophesied in dystopian cinema has already begun but there is more than meets the eye finds Satyen K. Bordoloi In the Terminator film series, the aim of the Artificial Intelligence machines is to exterminate humans. In the Matrix world, they use humans as batteries. In films like 2001 A Space Odyssey (1969) or Ex Machina, it is individuals who are at risk. As you can guess, harmful AI has been a favorite film trope even before the real advent of AI which began only after the 2010s. Since then, though, AI…

25 years after it was made, most things depicted in GATTACA have become reality writes Satyen K. Bordoloi as he finds strange parallels of the film’s world with the caste system Nobel Prizes have been tacit oracles for our future. If you look at those awarded in the last few years – especially the one given to CRISPR – you won’t be wrong in thinking we are heading big into genetically modifying humans. CRISPR is a method to cut-copy-paste genes into DNA. What nature takes millions of years to do, we can do near instantly. While the digital revolution radically…

A healthcare deficit nation like India can quickly turn a quarter thanks to Artificial Intelligence says Satyen K. Bordoloi In a remote village somewhere in its cow-belt where unlike in South India healthcare is scarce, a farmer – while working in his field – falls unconscious. The nearest doctor and hospital are thirty miles of bad roads away. But thanks to Digital India, internet connectivity is good. The man is brought to a rural clinic equipped with easy-to-use Artificial Intelligence (AI). The operator at the clinic who isn’t even a graduate puts a stethoscope with an AI sensor on the…

Yesterday’s science fiction is today’s reality as humans have already begun producing oxygen on Mars says Satyen K. Bordoloi In the climax of the 1990 sci-fi cult classic Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger is flung out into the atmosphere of Mars. His eyes and limbs begin bulging as there’s no oxygen to breathe. But just before this, he had managed to activate a giant instrument left by aliens that begins making oxygen on the planet’s surface. The result: he survives as the atmosphere of Mars is terraformed. Something similar has been happening since April 20, 2021 on the surface of Mars…

India’s EV market is being driven by cheap public vehicles says Satyen K. Bordoloi as he outlines how it could lead a global shift In December 2020, I witnessed a new vehicle in Guwahati. Regular buses don’t ply on interior routes serviced by cycle rickshaws, auto-rickshaws and trekkers i.e. modified SUVs like Tata Sumo. 8 months into the pandemic, I found the city full of electric rickshaws – called tomtoms locally – that ferried up to 6 people on these routes. Besides ease of driving and cost-effectiveness, their popularity also rested on the less paperwork they demanded. Since then, I’ve…

Video streaming makes up a bulk of global internet usage today, but how it came to pass reveals the ultimate human ingenuity writes Satyen K. Bordoloi When the first concert was broadcast live in 1993 as a proof of concept by Xerox, it hogged nearly half of the world’s total available internet data. No one thought of it back then, but that first streaming would become a metaphor for today when over 80% of all internet traffic is video i.e. streaming, and an average person is said to spend nearly 100 minutes daily watching videos. As this graph on the…

The world is producing so much data, there is a real danger of running out of storage if current trends continue writes Satyen K. Bordoloi while outlining solutions Bend the wrist, adjust the screen for an imperfectly cute frame, say ‘oooo’ (not smile) and press the red button on screen to click a selfie whose bits float through cyberspace and get saved in the ‘cloud’. You didn’t even think once before doing this. But you just added your 3 megabytes (MB) to, hold your breath, over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data the world generated today. Data might be the new…

Networking technology enabling streaming of everything from YouTube and Netflix to Zoom meetings, has transformed the world, yet Satyen K. Bordoloi says, it is only just putting on its shoes Back in 1998-99 when I first began using the internet, speeds were so slow that I heard of romances starting while waiting for a page to load. None then fantasized that in less than two decades, we’d stream videos with resolution high enough to project live to a big theatre screen. If a woman went into a coma in 1998 and emerged 20 years later, streaming would seem like sorcery.…

Climate Change is exacerbating the problem of cooling data centers leading us into a spiral with implications for the very existence of the human race finds Satyen K. Bordoloi When both Google and Oracle data centers in London went out together on July 19th this year, it seemed like a scene straight out of the series Mr Robot where its protagonist tries to reset the world by destroying data centers storing financial information. The actual reason turned out to be something which so far we thought affected only humans: heatwaves caused by Climate Change. Oracle left this message after this…

As the world faces a power crisis and climate catastrophe, giant batteries have become a necessity, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi as he discovers simple solutions already being rolled out The 1970s was a crisis decade. Wars in the middle east had disrupted oil supply worldwide. In response, an English chemist – Stanley Whittingham decided to use a 1912 idea to try and make a battery. It would take him and many scientists over a decade to perfect the Lithium-ion battery that would win them a Nobel prize and fuel the 21st century’s great energy addiction by powering its best devices.…