Rising inequality and social polarisation are set to shape world developments for the next decade after contributing to Britain's decision to leave the European Union and the ballot-box success of US president-elect Donald Trump, the World Economic Forum says. Climate change was underlined as the third major global trend in the WEF's annual assessment of global risks, published on Wednesday at an event at Bloomberg's European headquarters in London. It said world leaders must work together to avoid "further hardship and volatility in the coming decade". If everything goes to plan, we should see Australian growth around 2.8% in 2017, but there are a number of risks in both directions. Bellamy's CEO Laura McBain has been widely credited for transforming the family-run local company to a global brand.

Rising income inequality and the polarisation of societies pose a risk to the global economy in 2017 and could result in the rolling back of globalisation unless urgent action is taken, according to the World Economic Forum. Before its annual meeting in Davos next week, the WEF said the gap between rich and poor had been behind the UK's Brexit vote and Donald Trump's election victory in the US. And it warned that there were new threats to social cohesion from the robotics and artificial intelligence revolution. The organisation said fundamental reform of capitalism may be needed to tackle public anger. The WEF's annual global risks report – culled from 700 experts – found that rising income and wealth disparity, and increasing polarisation of sectors of society, were ranked first and third among the underlying trends that will determine the shape of the world in the next decade.

ANZ, in Melbourne, Australia, was among the first banks to explore the possibilities -- it began using IBM's Watson to help its financial advisers understand their clients in 2013. The hedge fund Bridgewater Associates hired the former chief engineer behind IBM's Watson supercomputer in 2013 to create a unit that would use AI to predict market trends. BlackRock built its own artificial intelligence engine to assist its investment managers and clients. Goldman Sachs uses the AI-based financial research platform Kensho. UBS, Deutsche Bank and others are using an AI engine called Sqreem.

Artificial intelligence is moving from science fiction to practical reality fast. AI -- technology that teaches machines to learn so they can perform cognitive tasks and interact with people -- is suddenly accessible to many companies. Costs associated with the advanced computing and data-storage hardware behind AI are plummeting. A growing number of vendors also offer AI tools such as robotic processing automation that can be configured without the help of a rocket scientist. So this is clearly an area more banks will need to pay attention to going forward.

Over the next four weeks, BBC News will be offering a snapshot of the day in the life of a city - looking at how technology is transforming our urban landscapes, now and in the future. We will look at how technology is improving the morning commute, what it is doing to make our working day better, how it will transform our evening's entertainment and what goes on at night in the smart cities that increasingly never sleep. We start as urban dwellers around the world begin the day - with the morning commute. In the future, that may mean hailing a jetpack. "Jetpacks will be part of future cities," Peter Coker, vice-president of innovation at KuangChi Science, Martin Aircraft Company's major Chinese shareholder.

A Welsh blogger asked her Amazon Echo to pronounce the longest place name in Europe - prompting the gadget to come back with an incomprehensible reply. Ms Angharad, who writes about food, said to the Echo: 'Alexa, what's the longest place name in Europe?' Llio Angharad asked the Echo to pronounce all 58 letters of the town's name. It replied correctly, noting that the town near Anglesey in north Wales had the'longest town name anywhere'. However, the pronunciation was described as'diabolical' by a Welsh speaker on Twitter. The place name is translated, roughly, into English as: St Mary's Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel Near to the Rapid Whirlpool of Llantysilio of the Red Cave.

Director Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" may be an alien movie, but you won't hear the sounds of warp speed, Martian death rays or beeping robots in it, say supervising sound editor Sylvain Bellemare and re-recording mixer Bernard Gariépy Strobl. "Denis really insisted on having a sound that was not electronic," Bellemare says of the film starring Amy Adams as a linguist trying to communicate with an alien species. "He wanted to do another type of science fiction. So he wanted to use an approach of [making] the sound really organic." Bellemare and Gariépy Strobl knew what they were in for, having worked together on several previous films, including Villeneuve's 2008 short "Next Floor."

Artificial intelligence is moving from science fiction to practical reality fast. AI -- technology that teaches machines to learn so they can perform cognitive tasks and interact with people -- is suddenly accessible to many companies. Costs associated with the advanced computing and data-storage hardware behind AI are plummeting. A growing number of vendors also offer AI tools such as robotic processing automation that can be configured without the help of a rocket scientist. So this is clearly an area more banks will need to pay attention to going forward.

We've all got bills to pay, fiscal responsibilities to meet, retirements to save for -- and we need help. As tens of thousands of chatbots proliferate across Slack, Facebook, and other platforms, you hear naysayers claim that bots might be useful someday but that today they're little more than a gimmick. It's hard to feel that way after you learn about a handful of chatbots that have saved people more than $10 million. Next time you hear someone make that argument, point them to this list, because perhaps nothing is more useful than putting (or keeping) money in your pocket. After its first month, about 100,000 people have interacted with PennyCat, according to maker Leo Kangin.

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of "The Great Gatsby," Takashi Nozaki's 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami's more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami's translation is written "in very polished Japanese," Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively "Murakami-style."