Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Would you carry nuclear batteries in your phone if you didn’t have to charge it ever asks Satyen K. Bordoloi as he goes into the history of a destructive technology whose constructive use as batteries – for mobiles to spaceships – threatens to change everything. The humanoid robot Terminator T100 played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the famous franchisee, does not need to recharge. It runs on two powerful, palm-sized batteries. For the last few decades, scientists have desperately been trying to make the science fiction of a battery small yet powerful enough to run a big machine which does not…

In the previous two parts of this digital crimeverse trilogy, we highlighted 25 common ways cybercriminals can cheat you while in this Satyen K. Bordoloi tells you of digital hygiene habits to keep both your money and sanity safe. When Vishal Singh – on a working day in his company in Gurugram – got a message from his boss on WhatsApp, he wondered why the number was different. But the display photo was his boss’s so he didn’t suspect it even when the boss said he couldn’t talk as he was in the middle of a customer negotiation but needed…

In the first part of this trilogy, we talked about 10 most common ways India’s cybercriminals target us while here Satyen K. Bordoloi expands the crimeverse with 15 more ways in which they can cheat you and in the next part, how you can arm yourself against them. Last September, when Assam Police Crime Branch received a tip-off about a fake call centre in Guwahati, they believed it to be a routine job. But what Guwahati Police ended up unearthing, was a multi-crore scam that had eight illegal call centres to scam both Indians and foreigners in the guise of…

With the rise of digital India, cybercrimes have risen exponentially, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. This three-part series surveys the 25 most common ways cybercriminals try to cheat you and what you can do to protect yourself. Remember these well, for they might save you millions. 2024 began horribly for some who became victims of cybercrimes: a Bengaluru resident lost ₹96,000 trying to order alcohol online for the new year, a Mumbai actress was swindled of ₹5.79 Lakh with a fake parcel of drugs, a trader in Rajkot lost ₹5 lakhs, while sextortion and dating scams over the end of the…

Generative AI so far has depended on AI companies illegally scraping data off the net including copyrighted ones writes Satyen K. Bordoloi as he highlights both sides of lawsuits that can define the future of AI and human progress. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” said Ernest Hemingway. Ask ChatGPT to write in Hemingway’s style and it will do so within seconds. So, like Hemingway bled (literally as well) to gain the experiences that made his writing deep – how much did ChatGPT bleed to churn out a copy? This…

Among the many developments from 2023, Satyen K. Bordoloi picks four that will affect all of our futures irretrievably. The future, back in the past, was simpler, and fairly predictable. Study, get a job, settle down, retire and wait to die – was the routine of most lives. As each of us has observed, this does not seem to fit anymore. 2023 was the year that proved this irrevocably. Here are four fields where, so many changes occurred in 2023, that it will change everything we do going forward. Image Credit: Shutterstock GENETIC EDITING FOR COMMON CONDITIONS: 2023 will end…

Spike Jonze’s Her is one of those quiet films that does not call attention to itself but whose stature would only increase with the rise of Artificial Intelligence – and our loneliness – writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. “The heart’s not like a box that gets filled up; it expands in size the more you love,” and “The past is just a story we tell ourselves,” – two of the most iconic lines in 2013’s Her, writer-director Spike Jonze gives a character we never see, yet is one whose presence defines the film and gives it its name. The ‘her’ is…

The first ever gene editing therapies to cure a disease were approved in the UK and US, heralding a new age of medicine writes Satyen K. Bordoloi as he outlines what this means not just for medicine, but life on the planet itself. The seminal 1997 film Gattaca has one fundamental flaw. In it, embryos are genetically modified to remove diseases, but no genetic treatment seems to exist for human’s post-birth. Surely, if science advanced enough to allow gene edits before birth, we could do that later as well. Despite being seminal, Gattaca made one fundamental mistake: in it embroys…

A recently launched AI-pin by the company Humane has the world excited about an AI replacement for the ‘humble’ smartphone, but Satyen K. Bordoloi looks beyond to divine into the future and draw a straight line from this device to the coming age of Personal AI. In the 2013 film ‘Her’, the protagonist Theodore installs a Machine Learning system on all his devices. He carries the AI in his shirt pocket, chats like one would a real person, and begins having romantic feelings about ‘her’. The film was seminal for multiple reasons. One is our desperate need for connections and…

It’s just been a year since ChatGPT but it has changed our very understanding of Artificial Intelligence writes Satyen K. Bordoloi while arguing that not all of what we think about AI is correct. When I began writing about Artificial Intelligence about six years ago, it was hard to get people’s attention. Most knew about AI but didn’t care enough to delve deeper even though all of them were using it, albeit indirectly. Not surprising, considering that is our culture: we use the mobile without ever wondering how that magnificent machine works. Image Credit: Ai Lib on Flickr Then, exactly…