NEW: If AI erodes paths to growth, like manufacturing and service exports, what can poor countries do? I went through commonly-recommended contenders and came out skeptical that any are a truly comparable growth engine. Is sending people to rich countries the best bet?

New: AI could keep poor countries poor by eliminating paths to economic growth. Stocks in Indian IT firms and Philippines' call centers have been selling off, driven by fears about AI automation. In an age of AI, will the world need any of what poor countries sell?

Rats are virtually everywhere humans live. Except for Alberta, Canada. Most residents there have never even seen one. How did they eliminate a pest we take as a fact of life? By waging war.

We've gotten used to technology being democratizing but, unfortunately, it seems unlikely AI will be a leapfrog miracle story. New post out now on why: newsletter.deenamousa.com/p/ai-wont-b...

Roundup of my favorite May reading: India's IT revenue and employment decoupled for the first time in 2 decades, ChatGPT's obsession with goblins is actually very human, and in countries with fewer than 1 doctor/10,000 people, the AI-and-jobs debate looks a *little* different tinyurl.com/mrybv9f9

Roundup: AI as complement

Endogenous tasks; AlphaFold and scientific bottlenecks; intelligence-as-a-service in LMICs; cracks in India's IT story; the North-South diffusion gap; why language models are weird

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New post: Unfortunately, nobody knows what AI exposure means. newsletter.deenamousa.com/publish/pos...

The leading indicator graveyard

Nobody knows what 'AI exposure' means

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New post: We don't know why Malawi is so poor newsletter.deenamousa.com/p/we-dont-k...

New: Big technological advances in health, agriculture, and connectivity have not moved Malawi out of subsistence — and there's no war or state collapse to blame. Without knowing why Malawi is poor, you can't predict what AI will do for growth in low-income countries.

In 1925, hybrid corn came online in the US. It yielded ~20% more/acre, but by 1933 it was on just 0.1% of US corn acreage. It took another drought in 1936 to move Iowa farmers, Europe didn't follow until the 50s, and global adoption is still patchy. Could AI look the same?

I recently got the chance to speak with radiology residents @umasschan.bsky.social about AI's impact on their field This slide particularly resonated: a familiar pattern they've seen with AI assistive tools is having to nudge MDs to trust them *less*

Looking at workers in industrial jobs exposed to automation, those who worked with robots directly were more likely to believe both that (a) their job was automatable and (b) robots would create new job opportunities for them.

College students would need to be paid $59 (on average) to deactivate TikTok for a month, but would *pay* $28 for it to be deactivated for them and their social circles for the same amount of time.

AI is often framed as Africa’s next leapfrog. In Ep2 of our @voxdev.bsky.social series, Rose Mutiso argues this is the wrong frame: AI isn’t end-user tech like mobile phones, but an upstream, infrastructure-heavy system that concentrates value where power, compute, and data already exist.

AI in Africa: Barriers, opportunities and policy

Can AI take off in Africa? Rose Mutiso joins us to discuss the need for an energy and digital infrastructure revolution on the continent, and how to make it happen.

voxdev.org

People invoke the Industrial Revolution as reassurance about AI. But living through it meant decades of wage stagnation, job loss & unrest. Ep1 of a new @voxdev.bsky.social series, we talk to economic historian Bruno Caprettini about what that analogy gets right/wrong t.co/AyuTVMKcEY

AI and the industrial revolution: Similarities, differences and lessons

How did society change during the industrial revolution? Are there lessons we can learn for the AI revolution?

voxdev.org

The “AI bubble” may be less catastrophic than it sounds. Even if it pops, it’s leaving behind real infrastructure, much like past bubbles did. My take for @TheMorningNews.org 2025 year-in-review post:

And I thought this was pretty interesting from @deenamousa.com

New post: ML trained on phone usage data can help identify households in need during crises. Not yet finalized your end of year giving? I've teamed up with GiveDirectly along with a few other Substackers, and I’ll be matching the first $500 in donations through the link in post.

Just out in @technologyreview.com: I look at the companies using AI to measure how much pain patients are in based on everything from involuntary facial movements, to heart rate, to peripheral temperature changes. Will this oust the classic self-reported 1-10 scale?

A new paper in the Lancet finds that doctors got *worse* at finding precancerous growths during colonoscopies on their own if they had just spent three months using an AI assistive tool Worrisome sign that deskilling may happen a lot faster than we'd expect.

We also don't fully understand why many people experience phantom limb pain, and many others don't x.com/deenamousa/...

New post: When can more automation mean more human workers? One argument I made in my recent @worksinprogress.bsky.social piece is that if automation made reading scans quicker and cheaper, this might result in *more* jobs for radiologists, rather than fewer. How does this apply to other jobs? 🧵

In 2016 Geoffrey Hinton said “we should stop training radiologists now" since AI would soon be better at their jobs. He was right: models have outperformed radiologists on benchmarks for ~a decade. Yet radiology jobs are at record highs, with an average salary of $520k. Why?

I really enjoy Adam Mastroianni's Experimental History — I expect I'll like following some of the winners of his blog competition just as much! A few of my favorites in thread:

My contribution to the AI job destruction discourse: Why are radiologists still around?

I was recently surprised to learn how little we know about pain. For example, Americans have been experiencing more chronic pain over time, and we're not entirely sure why 1/

I heard we're talking about air conditioning again... my thoughts on the subject one year ago in @worksinprogress.bsky.social www.worksinprogress.news/p/heat-waves

AI art residencies are popping up. In @theverge.com, I write about these programs and the artists in them. And, in my newsletter, I write about how interacting with tech in culture can shape perspectives before laws are written. 🧵 bsky.app/profile/the...

We treat QALYs as a uniform unit of measure, but every QALY may not be the same. We may care more about QALYs when we're sickest. This makes sense, given how we think about income increases, but isn't how we evaluate health. I write about why in a new post, linked below.

Great post by @deenamousa.com on the tricky concept of putting a price on life. How much do people say they'd value an extra year in perfect health or without disease? And why does this vary between people, or different framings of the question?

How much do you value a year of life?

Part 1: What people say

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How much is a year of your life worth? In Denmark, the average answer is $24,000. In Japan, it’s about $67,000. New post up on what we say when asked to put a price on life. 🧵