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

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

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.

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

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 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. 🧵

Could we catch the next outbreak before anyone gets sick? I wrote for @asimovpress.bsky.social about airborne biosensors that can detect viruses in real time and why, despite their promise, we’re not using them yet.

As a resident of NYC, I am no stranger to noise. Often, we try to let traffic or construction fade into the background and consider it a nuisance. But could it be driving serious health issues?

Snakebite kills tens of thousands of people a year and disables hundreds of thousands more. Anti-venom research has barely progressed in decades. This study, using antibodies from a man who deliberately let snakes bite him 200 times, suggests a path to a universal anti-venom. 🧵

New post about a few "big if true" health interventions that might be much more important than we think. They’re strange, they’re striking - and they need more research.

New post! Ghibli filters, dopamine apps, frictionless AI — we’re getting better at giving ourselves exactly what we want. What does progress look like when reality itself can be remade to match our desires? 🧵

📠 New Substack post 📠 How do the politics and economics of 'Abundance' work in Britain, compared to America? notes.archie-hall.com/p/can-the-br...

👀 The case for strange & seemingly impractical research 💬 “Government-funded scientific research may appear strange or impractical, but it has repeatedly yielded scientific breakthroughs — & continues to pay for itself many times over.” ✍️ @deenamousa.com & @lgilbert.co @asteriskmag.bsky.social

Great to be at the Abundance book launch with @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social & @dkthomp.bsky.social in NYC last night. A core, striking idea from the book: The U.S. isn’t failing to solve housing, healthcare, and energy shortages because it can’t. It’s failing because it won’t. 🧵

Working paper out this week looks at the effect of congestion pricing on travel using Google Maps data and finds a 15% speed increase within the central business district

Excited that Open Philanthropy is expanding our work on economic growth and scientific progress. The case for the Abundance & Growth Fund is simple: Economic growth isn’t just about GDP—it’s one of the most powerful forces for improving human lives. 🧵

Every year, we waste enough food to feed the world’s hungry—several times over. Globally, 30-40% of food produced—1.3 billion tons—is never eaten. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions still starve. How did we end up here? 🧵

New York City just launched the first congestion pricing program in the U.S. Drivers entering Manhattan south of 60th Street now pay up to $15 per trip. It’s controversial, but cities that have tried it have seen less traffic, better air quality, and more funding for transit. 🧵

Deeply important research: The two-stair rule for mid-sized apartments once made sense, but today it blocks housing with no clear benefit. 🧵 x.com/Sustainable...

One of the dangers of rising polarization and mistrust is that people start rejecting even the most well-documented facts—like that smoking is catastrophically bad for you. There's no hidden agenda here; and the government has plenty of self-serving reasons to care too 🧵 x.com/sarahcstock...

New post! We celebrate breakthroughs—the internet, life-saving drugs, major peace treaties—but behind them are decades of overlooked investments. Now, those investments are on the chopping block. 🧵

Climate change gets $1.3 trillion in annual funding. But only 7% of that—$63B—goes to helping people adapt to rising temperatures, floods, and extreme weather. Why does adaptation funding lag so far behind mitigation? 🧵

also @deenamousa.com and I made the front page of hacker news defending studying frog skin, the sex lives of flies and other "weird" research

Interesting new NBER working paper: Most people worry about outdoor air pollution, but, in many homes, indoor air is worse. A field experiment in London tested whether showing people their indoor pollution levels in real time might change behavior and finds a 17% reduction. 🧵

I spent a few weeks in Hong Kong this winter and noticed color and visual design everywhere in the architecture. I learned these design choices weren’t just aesthetic: they were built to accommodate historically high rates of illiteracy. 🧵

Skepticism of government-funded scientific research is making the rounds again. In @asteriskmag.bsky.social, @lgilbert.co‬ and I write about why “weird” research pays off, and how the government is particularly well-positioned— better than the private sector—to fund it. 🧵 x.com/deenamousa/...