Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Six nations are flying off to the Moon in a year finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he discovers six reasons for this sudden rush and also India’s role in this stampede Though films had been made for seven years before, cinema truly began only after Georges Méliès’ 1902 masterpiece: A Trip to the Moon. At a time when flying hadn’t even been invented, no one could imagine that barely 57 years later humans would land a mission on the Moon. Yet, like the before and after of Méliès’ film, the real, deeper exploration of the Earth’s lunar satellite would only…

The world’s first self-driving AI cargo ship completed a 500-mile journey with 99% autonomy, while similar cars on land struggle to achieve much less. Satyen K. Bordoloi looks under the bonnet to tell you why, and when you can expect to buy a fully-autonomous car In the 2004 film I, Robot, Will Smith abhors robots. After an accident where two cars fall into a river, instead of saving a little girl’s life like he asks the robot to do, its AI brain calculates a higher probability of saving him, so it abandons the girl. His dichotomy: he should love robots…

Before we have even launched 5G mobile technology, 6G is already making a splash and threatens to change the world beyond recognition, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Technology is developing at such a breakneck speed that before we even get used to a new product, something better arrives on the market. 5G is yet to roll out with parts of the world still reliant on 2G and 3G, yet 6G i.e., the sixth-generation wireless communications technologies supporting cellular data networks, is slated to transform the world further still. For previous generations, the key differentiator was speed. 3G started getting close to…

Genetic sequencing and editing, from the realm of science fiction less than a quarter-century ago has turned real with a vengeance, leaving the human race unprepared for its consequences finds out Satyen K. Bordoloi In the highly underrated 1997 film Gattaca, the protagonist named Vincent Freeman is – ironically – not free. But it is not the social externalities such as the colour of his skin, his station of birth, or his position in class hierarchy that cause him to suffer discrimination, but rather it is his genetic code. In this not-so-distant future, designer babies whose genes are altered before…

AI has come alive: has been the refrain of the world after a Google researcher claimed so. But has it really, wonders Satyen K. Bordoloi as he delves into the reasons for our sentient AI fetish “It’s alive! It’s alive!” These portentous words from the 1931 movie Frankenstein best captured the singular sentiment about Artificial Intelligence the entire past week. This was prompted after a Google employee Blake Lemoine was so flabbergasted by the responses of LaMDA – a language mode AI – to his questions that he went rogue and released his interactions to the world. Google, on their…

Marvel films have changed dramatically since their origin as a sci-fi genre, turning away from science to embrace magic and fantasy says Satyen K. Bordoloi who tells us that what is good for the franchise may not be so for the world In the 2008 film Iron Man, after Tony Stark gets inside his suit for the first time, he decides to test it. Jarvis, his Artificial Intelligence assistant, complains since there are terabytes of calculations remaining before an actual flight. But Stark says, “Jarvis, sometimes you gotta run before you can walk.” That line was prophetic because fifteen years…

Hacking, till now, has been about money but for the first time a ransomware group demanded money to not overthrow an elected government of a nation, finds out Satyen K. Bordoloi Something unprecedented happened in the month of May 2022. The Conti Ransomware hacking group threatened to overthrow the newly democratically elected government of Costa Rica if they aren’t paid 20 million dollars. Perhaps it was to be expected: research has shown that the group is based out of Russia. On May 8, Rodrigo Chaves became President of Costa Rica, along with 57 other Congressmen, who were part of the…

Despite an agro economy like India being hugely reliant on cattle, animal husbandry had not received the type of digital support it needs. In the last few years though, a plethora of online apps and portals are using everything from veterinarians to Machine Learning to fill this gap finds Satyen K. Bordoloi For agrarian societies cattle rearing and trading is one the oldest extant professions. On the health of livestock, civilisations have soared or crumbled. More so in India which isn’t just the world’s largest producer of milk but has even turned cows into symbols of faith. India also has…

Every ‘expert’ commenting on Netflix’s current decline, has looked at its content as the problem. But they forget Netflix is first and foremost a tech company and the solution to its current crisis, might lie in its Artificial Intelligence, claims Satyen K. Bordoloi Anil did not know that Netflix has over 17,000 titles, 2.2 million minutes or 36,000 hours of content (2020 data) and it launched approximately 2,769 hours of content in 2019. Averaging an hour after work that he watches Netflix daily, this is enough to last him a 100 years or at least a decade of content he…

A fully autonomous car was a dream AI experts predicted would arrive almost a decade ago, yet it is proving to be a problem too hard to crack even for the best minds in the world finds out Satyen K. Bordoloi Elon Musk is considered a genius except in this viral montage video of him promising a fully autonomous car every year from 2014 to 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7oZ-AQszEI In 2014 he says, “A Tesla car, next year will probably be… 90% of your miles can be on auto.” In 2015: “We’re probably only a month away from having autonomous driving.” The…