What is the Polycrisis? & Satya Nadella on how AI is changing India | WEF | Top Stories of the Week

This week's top stories of the week include:

0:15 What is the polycrisis? - Everyone’s saying we’re in a ‘polycrisis’, but what is it, and how do we get out of it? The world is facing a cascade of converging challenges. Experts have coined a new term for this cluster of interconnected risks - Polycrisis.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 polled 1,200 experts from across the world. In the next 2 years, they say the cost-of-living crisis is the largest short-term risk. But over the next decade, failure to abate climate change is a larger threat. 6 of the top 10 long-term risks are climate-related.

Just like the polycrisis, climate change is a multifaceted problem, say experts, and to solve it, governments, businesses, and the civil sector must work together. The report shows the risk of a polycrisis receding as time goes on. 80% predict it will dominate the next 2 years, but only 50% said this will still be the case after 10 years. Do you think we’re in a polycrisis?

1:49 First 2 storey 3D printed home in the US - The first ever two-storey 3D printed home in the US is being laid down on a street in Texas by a printer weighing more than 12 tonnes. The 2-storey house will have 370m2 of living space. The 3D printed home consists of concrete ‘cores’, such as stairwells linked by a system of timber framing. Printing the house will take 330 hours. Creators HANNAH, CIVE, and PERI 3D Construction hope to finish this 3D printed home by late 2023.

Meanwhile, scientists at the University of Maine printed a home using wood waste, mixing sawdust and wood chips with bio-resin to create a 3D printed home made completely from recyclable materials. Watch for more details.

2:48 Satya Nadella explains how AI is changing India - ChatGPT is a powerful AI-driven chatbot that launched last year. It can converse and write readable text on demand based on what it has learned from a huge database of books, articles and other media.

"In India, one of the things that's very exceptional that's happening is digital public goods that are getting built, for identity, payment, many systems, and one of the digital public goods that's getting built is for language translation. So basically they have an open source project so that anybody building any application in India can translate between any Indian language. So a demo I saw was a rural Indian farmer trying to access some government programme, right? So he just expressed a complex thought in speech in one of the local languages that got translated and interpreted by a bot, and a response came back saying, ‘go to a portal and here is how you’ll access the programme’. He said, ‘look, I'm not going to go to the portal. I want you to do this for me’. And it completed it. And the reason why it was able to complete it was because a developer building it had taken GPT and trained it over all of the Government of India documents and then scaffolded it with the speech recognition software."

4:57 Larry Summers on inflation - Inflation in the US is currently at 6.5% and 10.4% in the EU. Central banks are raising interest rates in a bid to lower inflation. Higher interest rates makes borrowing more expensive. This constrains economic growth and can lead to recession.

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