Arvind's Newsletter

1.Indian airports soar as transit hubs for international travellers

The number of international passengers on Indian carriers passing through six major Indian airports — Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad — to reach their final destinations increased by 97.09 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y) to 68,305 in February, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium’s data reviewed by Business Standard.

The top six final destinations for these transit passengers were Dhaka, Kathmandu, Colombo, Bangkok, Singapore, and Dubai.

This growth is being capitalised more by full-service carriers, such as Air India and Vistara, than by low-cost carriers like IndiGo. In absolute numbers, IndiGo’s international transit traffic through the six airports increased by 48.6 per cent Y-o-Y in February 2024.

2.92% of knowledge workers in India use AI at work as compared to the global figure of 75%.

India Inc. is witnessing a transformative shift, with a staggering 92% of knowledge workers across diverse sectors actively integrating artificial intelligence (AI) tools into their daily workflows, compared to the global average of 75%, according to a joint study by internet giant Microsoft and professional networking platform LinkedIn. 

Notably, 72% of AI employees are proactively bringing their own AI solutions to work, rather than relying solely on company-provided resources to enhance productivity. In comparison, the global average for AI workers embracing Bring Your Own Artificial Intelligence (BYOAI) stands at 78%.  

3.UPI Growth 2.0: Efforts on to Crack DBT Code
The Reserve Bank of India and banks are looking to get beneficiaries of the government's direct benefit transfer (DBT) schemes to do their routine transactions on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform, in a bid to make more people transact digitally instead of cash.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which runs UPI, is also onboarding district cooperative banks and rural cooperative banks onto the platform so that they can offer digital payment services to their customers, mostly from rural India with many of them being DBT beneficiaries.

“There are approximately 300 million users on UPI currently. The debit card base in this country is 960 million. So, there is a huge market which is untapped,” said a senior payments industry executive who works on UPI. “The question is how can we get them into the digital payments ecosystem.”

4.Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down

"A year ago, Google said that it believed AI was the future of search. That future is apparently here: Google is starting to roll out 'AI Overviews,' previously known as the Search Generative Experience, or SGE, to users in the US and soon around the world. Pretty soon, billions of Google users will see an AI-generated summary at the top of many of their search results. And that’s only the beginning of how AI is changing search." 

“What we see with generative AI is that Google can do more of the searching for you,” says Liz Reid, Google’s newly installed head of Search, who has been working on all parts of AI search for the last few years. “It can take a bunch of the hard work out of searching, so you can focus on the parts you want to do to get things done, or on the parts of exploring that you find exciting.”

As AI has come for search, products like Perplexity and Arc have come under scrutiny for combing and summarising the web without directing users to the actual sources of information. Reid says it’s a tricky but important balance to strike and that one way Google is trying to do the right thing is by simply not triggering overviews on certain things. But she’s also convinced and says early data shows that this new way of searching will actually lead to more clicks to the open web.

5.The US spent more servicing the interest on its debt over the past seven months than it did on national defense or health care for the elderly — and more than education, support for military veterans, and transportation combined.

The figures were highlighted by a bipartisan Washington, DC, think tank, which noted that interest payments were the fastest growing part of the US federal budget, and based on current trends would form the largest single line item by 2051. The US’ mammoth debt burden is increasingly a threat to its superpower status, experts say: “Any great power that spends more on debt service … than on defence,” the historian Niall Ferguson wrote, “will not stay great for very long.”

6.21 million is the age in years of the baobab tree species, according to a recent study by a group of scientists in the UK and Africa.

Their work also revealed that the “tree of life" originated in Madagascar, from where it traveled to mainland Africa and then onwards to other regions as far as Oceania. According to the authors, the trees — which can live for thousands of years on account of their capacity to store water throughout dry seasons — are endangered because of climate change and widespread deforestation.

7.Why growing China-Russia military ties worry the west

For two years, Chinese backing for Russia’s war in Ukraine has been western governments’ biggest concern about the two countries’ burgeoning relationship. But two weeks ago, US officials raised alarm over their co-operation in another key security theatre: the seas around Taiwan. 

“We see them, China and Russia, for the first time exercising together in relation to Taiwan,” Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, told US lawmakers. “[We are] recognising that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t.”

The US has had to adapt to closer co-operation between the Chinese and Russian militaries, Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the same Senate hearing.

Even if Russian and Chinese forces were not capable of seamlessly operating together, “they would certainly be co-operative, and we need to take that into account in our force structure and planning”, Kruse said. “We are in the middle of that revision today.” Their comments reflect how deep the military relationship has become under Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who are meeting this week in Beijing.

Military ties have developed to span closer joint exercises and co-operation on missile defence. And while Russia and China do not have a mutual defence treaty, as the US does with its allies, analysts believe that does not preclude military co-operation with significant global impact.

8.How to Get Better At Learning From Experience; David Epstein, journalist and author of one of my most favourite books in recent times - Range

In 2009, two of the leading figures in those areas of research — Gary Klein (NDM), and Daniel Kahneman (heuristics and biases) — got together to hash it out in what Kahneman called an “adversarial collaboration” paper.

In the paper, Kahneman and Klein concluded that whether or not experience alone reliably predicted exceptional performance hinged on the characteristics of the domain in question. Essentially, they agreed that Robin Hogarth had gotten it right: in what Hogarth called “kind” learning environments, experience led to predictable improvement; in “wicked” learning environments, it did not.

You can think of kind learning environments as situations that are governed by stable rules and repetitive patterns; feedback is quick and accurate, and work next year will look like work last year. Think golf or chess: a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries; a consequence is quickly apparent; and similar challenges occur repeatedly.

In wicked learning environments, rules may change, if there are rules at all; patterns don’t just repeat; feedback could be absent, delayed, or inaccurate; all sorts of complicated human dynamics might be involved, and work next year may not look like work last year.

To learn know about Range see the link below