Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Biology has largely been digitized and we are at the cusp of hacking and cracking the code of life itself finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he says that humans living to 150, or more, is in the anvil. When Elon Musk introduced NeuraLink to the world, everyone gasped, few for the right reasons. Most understood its intention as connecting brain neurons so we can move things with the mind. That is a low-hanging fruit. What Musk wanted to achieve – whether he realises it or not – is the pinnacle of Digital Biology aka synthetic biology sometimes aka biohacking –…

Google finally released its ChatGPT competitor to the world but a test run by Satyen K. Bordoloi gives a mixed bag of results One of the smartest things about ChatGPT is one of its simplest: the small left panel shows a cache of past conversations. This is an invaluable tool because you can go back, reconnect with an old query and advance the conversation forward. The first thing you notice when you use the recently released for the world Google’s ChatGPT competitor Bard, is it does not have this simple feature. You close the tab and poof, everything goes. This…

When it comes to electric vehicles, the country set to change the world is India and it’s already doing so in unique ways finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. Few know that electric vehicles (EVs) were invented 200 years ago and are as old as petrol-diesel ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles. Between the 1890s and 1910s, EVs competed with ICE for US market dominance as people preferred EVs for mobility inside cities. A century later, we have a redux in the US. However, the real EV revolution is happening thousands of miles away, in India, where local ‘jugaad’ – tinkering – is…

First generative AI like Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and MidJourney, then ChatGPT and clones have woken us to the potential of AI but its full possibility will surface in the first truly zero-budget film made without a camera writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Democratization of cinema is a term used often to describe the digitization of the means of filmmaking. Everyone who has a mobile, it is said, can become a filmmaker. But anyone who has tried to shoot anything decent with a mobile knows how tough this is. And even if visuals are cinematic, how do you record flawless sound? This…

Like intelligent humans burnt at the stake in the past, the witchhunt of artificial ‘intelligence’ is afoot and shamefully led by some of our smartest people driven by some primal instincts writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Before the Age of Enlightenment, if a person had better intelligence than those around them: they faced one of two fates. If the pack found a way to use it, they would celebrate them. If they feared it because they did not understand, they would call them black magicians, and witches and lynch them. Intelligence has always inspired the opposite primitive instincts: reverence or murderous…

The internet is fast cramping up with art, content, literature, music etc. created by AI while the world is gradually filling up with gene-edited living things says Satyen K. Bordoloi. Geiger counters that measure radioactivity have a specific problem. They need iron smelted before 1945 i.e. before the first nuclear tests. Iron made since are polluted by the planet’s air rife with not much, but enough radioactivity for them not to give accurate radioactivity results. Like 1945, the 2020s have been a cut-off for almost everything else: from art and literature to culture, politics, history and even the genetic pool…

Unbeknownst to us, the Uberization of war has already begun where cheap, everyday tech is turning the tide in battlefields finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. The top hatch of a USD 5 million T-14 Armata Russian tank is open. Above it, a tiny drone barely costing a few hundred dollars, hovers undetected, aims and drops a grenade making it explode. In other viral footage, kamikaze drones do not drop anything, instead drive themselves and thus their cargo straight into these expensive metal boxes. Tanks, one of the most potent weapons of war for over a century, have been upended by a…

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,…