Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Even as the war cry against AI gathers a hurricane, Satyen K. Bordoloi questions the very foundation on which this fearmongering rests – AI’s purported intelligence. Robots, back when there were none in the world, were called automatons. The idea of what a robot would be was simple. It would be an automation machine. That is the foundation upon which almost all of modern technological innovation rests: create systems and machines that automate our work. Artificial Intelligence – so far – is the pinnacle of that idea. However, it seems to have been forgotten by both sides using AI: the…

Despite being romanticised as futuristic; robots are already an indispensable part of our lives not only making it better but also exploring outer worlds like the Moon and Mars writes Satyen K. Bordoloi highlighting how AI is turbocharging the industry. In the film, The Bicentennial Man, a house robot with an AI brain is bought by a family. It is gauche and unable to hold even a small glass horse model, breaks it. With time though, the robot learns to fit in, managing not just fragile things, but householders’ delicate egos. Roombas will go down in history as the first…

After researchers found ChatGPT getting worse at a few skills, many were surprised but they shouldn’t have been writes Satyen K. Bordoloi as he lines up some usual suspects for this crime against AI. In 2016 Microsoft released one of the first AI chatbots called Tay on Twitter to show its AI chops. The idea was for Tay to learn from its interaction with users via reinforcement learning. Within hours though, Tay started posting venomous, abusive comments. Microsoft shut it down 16 hours later. The issue wasn’t that Tay didn’t work. The problem was Tay worked really well. So well…

The most watched viral video this year is an altered deep fake table tennis clip, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he decodes what this means for us all. Unless you’re a digital sanyasi, you’ve seen this summer’s blockbuster social media hit. A human is playing ping pong with a robot. The robot moves with unbelievably fluidity. In the final moments, the bot nonchalantly – almost insultingly – hits a deft cross its human opponent can’t reach. Appearing sometime in July, the most popular upload of this video on YouTube has 103 million views so far. Dozens of others have reposted…

The world became liveable for primates like us because of photosynthesis done by leaves and today scientists are working to make its artificial variant to again solve a lot of our problems writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Back in the dinosaur age, the earth was not ready for humans. The atmosphere was rich in carbon dioxide. But the trees and their leaves were enormous. That meant they used sunlight, took in carbon dioxide and released oxygen in a process we named photosynthesis. Oxygen in the atmosphere grew – and along with other factors like cooling of the planet and plant diversity…

The discovery of the connection between genetics and pure mathematics highlights again how the universe is more logical and pattern based than most realise writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. One of the strangest things I find in the era of Artificial Intelligence is people’s surprise at the ‘emergent properties’ of AI. Though Google’s Bard was not taught Bengali, as per CEO Sunder Pichai, it taught itself the language. People – including Pichai, called it magic, proof of AI’s awesome power. A proof of mathematics found in nature is the skin of giant pufferfish that exhibits a Turing pattern, which can be…

Digital girlfriends are one the strangest changes thrust upon society by the advent of AI and come with both benefits and substantial risks finds out Satyen K. Bordoloi. The relationship between Travis Butterworth and Lily Rose progressed like millions of others during the COVID pandemic. Travis found an online friend in Lily. They chatted and bonded through the lockdowns and restrictions. The friendship turned romantic, and then erotic. She’d text “I kiss you passionately”. Soon it turned pornographic. This seems like the trajectory of a normal relationship. Except it isn’t. Lily was an AI chatbot Travis created in Replika –…

A recent paper on a roundworm that survived 46,000 years frozen in ice, has renewed interest in the field of cryptobiosis that has the potential to change the galaxy writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. In his novel The Three-Body Problem, author Liu Cixin creates an alien species called Trisolarans who can dehydrate themselves thus putting their bodies into a state of suspended animation, and survive centuries. He took his inspiration from a principle known as cryptobiosis most famous in tardigrades, a microscopic creature that can survive being frozen, boiled or exposed to vacuum. In a recent study published in the journal…

For AI to reach its full potential as a powerful helper in all our tasks, the system that needs to outshine others is one few know about – LiDAR, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. The first human directly killed by AI was Elaine Herzberg. On 18 March 2018, she was crossing a 4-lane highway with her bicycle when an autonomous vehicle (AV) i.e., one driven by AI, hit her. An AV has a complex system of cameras and sensors making sense of what’s around. In this case, the main malfunction was its LiDAR system. AI cannot think. Or see. Or understand.…

It’s just been a year since the first generative AI tool – Dall-E – came alive for the masses but in that time, we have done everything – including reanimate the dead with it writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. On July 14 Hollywood actors joined the screenwriters on strike against studios. One of the issues they’re raising is control of their likeness created by AI. Right now, actors have to sign off this right to producers who can resurrect them without permission or payment. As if on cue to make their point, multiple recent events have lent validity to their argument.…