Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

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…

In spite of so much data being created every day, we run the risk of causing an information blackhole in the future, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Today the world creates more data in days than it did in a year till 2000. Yet, scientists fear that in a few hundred years, there will be an information blackhole about this time with researchers having less data to study us than in the times before the digital age. Sounds counterintuitive right? Billions of selfies are taken by millions of people daily, many uploaded to social media. So are all kinds of other…

Most people know nothing about the Dutch company ASML. This does little to dent the fact that it is the most important company in the world writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Do you know what is common to every electronic device in your home: from computers, TV and fridge to fans, mixers and lightbulbs? All of them have ICs or Integrated Chips, also simply called chips or microchips. Multiple miniaturized transistors and electronic components are integrated into one chip like the 5-nanometer Bionic chip in iPhone 13 and 14 have 15 billion transistors. Some of the world’s most profitable companies are…

Artificial intelligence systems hallucinate just as humans do and when ‘they’ do, the rest of us might be in for a hard bargain, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. When I prompted it, ChatGPT took less than a second to write a sonnet about hate in Shakespeare’s voice that began: “Hate, the poison that doth gnaw the soul; And turn the heart to stone, a bitter thing; That spreads its venom, maketh us to cower; And robbeth us of love and joy’s sweet fling.” It has even passed law and medical exams. But when I asked ChatGPT “what is the world record…