“Could one country outgrow the rest of the world?” by Tom Davidson

Author: LessWrong ([email protected])
Published: Fri 22 Aug 2025
Episode Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x8uzeok9zhHGeCKAq/could-one-country-outgrow-the-rest-of-the-world

This post is speculative and tentative. I’m exploring new ideas and giving my best guess; the conclusions are lightly held.

Summary

Bostrom (2014) says that an actor has a “decisive strategic advantage” if it obtains “a level of technological and other advantages sufficient to enable it to achieve complete world domination”.

One obvious route to a decisive strategic advantage is military dominance.

This post explores a different route. Could the country that leads in AI outgrow the rest of the world economically? If so, they could get a decisive strategic advantage without acting aggressively towards other countries and without breaking any international norms.

I’ll focus here on the economic fundamentals, setting aside considerations like whether other countries would intervene militarily to prevent one country from pulling ahead.

I consider two arguments for why a country could outgrow the rest of the world.

First, the [...]

---

Outline:

(00:20) Summary

(03:00) The Superexponential Growth Argument

(05:42) Objection 1: What about trade?

(08:46) Objection 2: But no country is self-sufficient!

(12:08) Objection 3: What about technological diffusion and stealing?

(17:11) An argument for expecting significant technological diffusion

(17:22) Objection 4: Wouldn't outgrowing the world set a dangerous precedent?

(19:30) Assessing the Superexponential Growth Argument