Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

The 2-billion-year-old genome of life on Earth could be contaminated beyond redemption writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Radioactivity-measuring Geiger counters have a unique requirement. Its iron must come from steel produced before 1945. Nuclear tests have contaminated all of the planet’s air so much that the steel produced since is not sensitive enough to detect radiation accurately. Where do humans find this ‘low-background steel’ for Geiger counters? Ships that sank before 1945. The 2020s – much like 1945 – will be a cut-off decade for the purity of the human genome. As we go deeper into the future, we will not…

An Artificial Intelligence system refusing to cheat in a game where cheating was one of the rules is a huge deal, says Satyen K. Bordoloi Most films about Artificial Intelligence show one major drawback of AI: it cannot lie and cheat unless explicitly programmed. It would seem that being able to lie and manipulate is the cornerstone of what differentiates humans and AI which means AI can never be good at politics or diplomacy. Surprisingly, a new system has done just that – beat humans in politics and diplomacy, but not in the way we expected. What it has done,…

The biggest hurdle to being a space-faring civilization is the very first – beating gravity, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi as he outlines some of the strangest ways to reach escape velocity In almost every sci-fi film, ships cross in and out of earth’s atmosphere with ease. In reality, achieving escape velocity has proven a hard problem. Earth’s surface is so deep in a gravity well that the escape velocity required to get out of it is 11.2 kilometers/second. So far, we have done that by using huge rockets. But they are expensive, mostly not reusable, ineffective, unreliable, explosive, dangerous, and…

The participation of private players in India’s recent successes in the space program could transform humanity’s eternal exploration, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi In the sci-fi novels of The Expanse series, humans – thanks to fusion drive engines – have colonized the solar system a few hundred years from now. Millions live on different moons of the planets and in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Humans mine asteroids for ice, minerals and metals. In real life, the conquering of this ‘expanse’ began in earnest this year with 6 different moon missions and NASA claiming just days ago that by…

The unprecedented fine on big tech across the world may not be as bad as these companies would have you believe but perhaps could save them from themselves writes Satyen K. Bordoloi While the world has been preoccupied by Elon Musk’s (man)handling of Twitter and its employees, some other equally important tech news have been pushed to the background. One important tech news with implications for the world came from India where at the end of October the Competition Commission of India (CCI) imposed an unprecedented ₹2274 crore fine on Google. This is not the first time Google or other…

The true potential of AI will be unleashed only when its role in healthcare is expanded further says Satyen K. Bordoloi How much does it cost to educate a doctor? In the US it’s up to $250,000, in UK £220,000, in China and South Africa up to USD 100,000, in Australia it can go up to $200,000 and in India it can be as high as USD 150,000. Specialization beyond MBBS is exponentially expensive. Even before the COVID19 pandemic, the world was in a serious healthcare crisis. A World Bank report from 2019 states that for every 1000 Indians there…

Cloud computing promised the world but in the last few years doubts have arisen in companies about its need and feasibility finds Satyen K. Bordoloi Few today remember networked corporate offices in the first decade of the 21st century. Servers occupied the messiest parts from which multi-colored cables ran in a chaotic mess only network engineers could magically untangle. The joke in an office I worked in was that one IITian was hired just to keep track of which wire went where. Enterprise cloud computing of the 2010s magically transformed this ‘hellscape’. The office looked manageable again, wires behaved and…

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…