Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Satyen is an award-winning scriptwriter, journalist based in Mumbai. He loves to let his pen roam the intersection of artificial intelligence, consciousness, and quantum mechanics. His written words have appeared in many Indian and foreign publications.

The fax was invented 180 years ago, smartphones are 31 years old, while the electric car has existed for nearly two centuries reveals Satyen K. Bordoloi. We are forced to remember the dates of wars and conquests. They are important no doubt, but dates that have a direct impact on our daily lives are rarely given attention. Like when technologies we use every day were invented. This leads to interesting misconceptions. We might think an invention is a certain number of years old. Turns out we missed the real date by decades or a few millennia. Here are just five…

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Everyone has been talking about how great ChatGPT is at writing. But how much of it is true and what is hyped? Satyen K. Bordoloi tests it to find out. The greatest fear in everyone’s mind – fed as we are on AI doomsday scenario is that with ChatGPT getting so good at contextualising information, no job is safe from AI. Examples are given of how good it can write, how people are using it to create poems or writing screenplays. In the last two months that I have been using ChatGPT, curiosity has led me to give the model…

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After years of crippling ransomware attacks, federal agencies fought back with some unique out-of-the-box solutions in 2022 finds Satyen K. Bordoloi. When the ransomware attack on AIIMS paralysed India’s premier hospital in Delhi in November last year, the Indian government finally woke up to the threat of cybercriminals. At Sify.com though, we had a ‘we-told-you-so-moment’ as we had flagged the same issue here six months ago. Yet, there is good news on the Ransomware front. As per an analysis by a blockchain company Chainalysis, “2022 was an impactful year in the fight against ransomware. Ransomware attackers extorted at least $456.8…

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Due to the use of Artificial Intelligence in the taxation system in India, it is becoming harder to commit tax fraud writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Last year when the GSTN authorities in UP put the activities of traders through BIFA – an AI software to detect transactional anomalies – the name of a textile company in Hapur district came up. Despite a turnover of Rs. 25 crores, it had not deposited tax even once. The firm was using input credit from bills that had a value under Rs. 50,000 to avoid detection. The fraud had escaped human eyes, but not…

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In spite of so much data being created every day, we run the risk of causing an information blackhole in the future, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Today the world creates more data in days than it did in a year till 2000. Yet, scientists fear that in a few hundred years, there will be an information blackhole about this time with researchers having less data to study us than in the times before the digital age. Sounds counterintuitive right? Billions of selfies are taken by millions of people daily, many uploaded to social media. So are all kinds of other…

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Most people know nothing about the Dutch company ASML. This does little to dent the fact that it is the most important company in the world writes Satyen K. Bordoloi Do you know what is common to every electronic device in your home: from computers, TV and fridge to fans, mixers and lightbulbs? All of them have ICs or Integrated Chips, also simply called chips or microchips. Multiple miniaturized transistors and electronic components are integrated into one chip like the 5-nanometer Bionic chip in iPhone 13 and 14 have 15 billion transistors. Some of the world’s most profitable companies are…

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Artificial intelligence systems hallucinate just as humans do and when ‘they’ do, the rest of us might be in for a hard bargain, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. When I prompted it, ChatGPT took less than a second to write a sonnet about hate in Shakespeare’s voice that began: “Hate, the poison that doth gnaw the soul; And turn the heart to stone, a bitter thing; That spreads its venom, maketh us to cower; And robbeth us of love and joy’s sweet fling.” It has even passed law and medical exams. But when I asked ChatGPT “what is the world record…

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We rarely think of what ‘information’ is, but it is the single most important factor shaping our lives, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi… In the 1997 film Nothing To Lose, Tim Robbins sees his wife intimate with his boss. At the edge of a breakdown when a carjacker gets into his car, he does not respond to his threats. After a mad journey that risks his life, the film ends with him realizing his wife was not having an affair after all. Though a comedy, the film highlights something crucial: the power information – in this case misinformation – has to…

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Though ChatGPT can churn out great text in seconds, when it comes to self description, this cutting-edge technology seems to struggle finds out Satyen K. Bordoloi Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30 last year, the world has been unable to shut up about it. I used it and realised the hype is correct. And so are the fears. ChatGPT will upend the frontiers of human creativity as it exists today. However, I do not buy into the fact that all will end. Instead, with the help of AI systems like ChatGPT, human creativity will reach newer heights never…

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Chinese researchers claim to have figured out an algorithm that can use existing quantum computers to decrypt classical encryption heralding the age of quantum hacking writes Satyen K. Bordoloi. Is anything digital safe anymore? Your debit card pin has four numbers. There are ten thousand combinations any four numbers can make. Any system that wanted to crack your pin would take a decent amount of time to figure it out. But using quantum methods, this can be done exponentially faster. That is because in 2019 Google researchers calculated that its quantum computer was 158 million times faster than a supercomputer.…

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