samim
Polycrisis Guide
AI agents for understanding and responding to converging global catastrophic challenges
Overview
Polycrisis Guide describes our current global predicament: a web of interconnected challenges that amplify each other. Polycrisis Guide uses advanced AI Agents to help people and organizations comprehend, assess, and prepare for multiple systemic crises likely to converge within the next decade. These Agents offer multi-perspective analysis of the global polycrisis, integrating insights across disciplines to provide comprehensive risk assessments that would be impossible for any single human analyst.
Website: Polycrisis.guide - Open Source: Github
Understanding the Polycrisis
The term "polycrisis" describes our current global predicament: a complex web of interconnected challenges that amplify each other. Analysis suggests a significant probability that multiple systemic crises will converge within the next decade, potentially overwhelming our collective response capabilities. The situation is serious.
Challenges across climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, technological disruption, and more interact and compound one another. When one system begins to fail, it creates cascading effects that can trigger or intensify crises in other systems.
For example: Climate-induced crop failures can trigger food insecurity, leading to economic shocks. This interconnected nature of global challenges requires risk assessment approaches that transcend conventional single-domain expertise.
Polycrisis Guide
Polycrisis Guide is an online service that uses AI Agents to research and analyze the state of the global polycrisis from multiple perspectives. It integrates insights across disciplines, assessing risks from angles that would be impossible for any single human analyst to cover. It also provides an actionable preparation framework, enabling individuals and communities to build resilience against these converging challenges.
Polycrisis Guide was developed by Studio Samim as part of an AI Research Agent project for a client in financial risk management who prefers anonymity. While they've permitted public sharing of select information gathered with this toolset, contractual obligations prevent us from releasing the backend code and data at this time.
AI Research Agents
At the heart of Polycrisis Guide is a custom developed AI research agent that gathers comprehensive data on diverse crisis factors. This agent autonomously gathers and synthesizes information from diverse online sources and generates comprehensive reports and risk assessments using state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs).
The analysis process follows a three-tier approach: First, the agent generates browses the web and generates a comprehensive research report in long-form text with references for each risk factor. Then it extracts structured data from these reports, identifying key insights and datapoints. Finally, it synthesizes all this information to produce a risk assessment that captures the interconnected nature of these challenges.
Each risk factor includes a detailed research report that can be accessed when viewing the factor details. Every risk is analyzed using a structured framework that considers:
- Probability and impact assessments
- Temporal dynamics and timeframes
- Key metrics and thresholds
- Adaptation capacity and limitations
- Evidence quality and expert consensus
- System interactions and cascading effects
Key Indicators Agent
Polycrisis Guide features a monitoring system tracking critical indicators across multiple risk domains. The public version demonstrates this with fictional data, while our client's commercial version operates with real-time data. The system automatically monitors pre-determined threshold metrics that signal increased breakdown probability when crossed. This provides risk management professionals with early warnings that would normally require extensive manual research, delivering significant ROI by automating monitoring.
Research Findings
Based on AI-Agent powered analysis of global data sources, there is a 85-95% probability that multiple systemic crises will converge within the next decade. Key risk factors are accelerating and creating amplifying feedback loops that can rapidly transform manageable challenges into systemic breakdowns.
System Limitations
While the system analyzes thousands of sources, the depth and accuracy of its analysis directly correlate with the range and quality of sources examined. The current analysis is limited by not having an extremely deep source selection. Furthermore, AI research agents are inherently downstream from search engines and public data repositories, inheriting any biases or gaps in these information sources. Despite these limitations, the current system provides valuable insights that inform our practical Preparation Framework, designed to help individuals and communities build resilience.
Preparation Framework
The goal of Polycrisis Guide is to raise awareness about the polycrisis while avoiding both alarmism and complacency, and inspire collective action. During crisis preparation and response, AI large language models (LLMs) become invaluable tools for personalized guidance. Polycrisis Guide's preparation framework leverages this capability by providing individuals and organizations with carefully crafted prompts for LLM conversations that address complex challenges. You can copy and paste these prompts into ChatGPT, etc. to receive guidance tailored to your specific situation.
Call to Action
The polycrisis is a complex and rapidly evolving phenomenon. With multiple systemic crises likely to converge within the next decade, we must act now to build resilience at individual, community, and global levels. Time is of the essence.
Polycrisis Guide demonstrates the power of AI agents to analyze complex interconnected challenges that no single human expert could fully comprehend. The hope is that by combining AI with human ingenuity and collective action, we can navigate these unprecedented challenges and build a more resilient future for all. But nothing is certain.
Polycrisis Guide's vision is to help build a global network of individuals and organizations prepared to respond when crises hit. We invite YOU to contribute to this critical work.
