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 [...]

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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

(20:21) The Grabbing New Resources Argument

(23:20) Conclusion - could one country outgrow the rest of the world?

(24:48) Bonus - what about one company outgrowing the rest of the world?

The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
August 21st, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x8uzeok9zhHGeCKAq/could-one-country-outgrow-the-rest-of-the-world

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

When countries grow at the same exponential rate, the relative size of their GDPs stays constant over time.

$When countries follow the same superexponential growth trajectory, bigger countries grow faster and become increasingly large fractions of world GDP. In this plot, each country’s growth is given by the same hyperbolic equation <span>__T3A_INLINE_LATEX_PLACEHOLDER___Y(t) = Y_0 / (1 - kY_0t)___T3A_INLINE_LATEX_END_PLACEHOLDER__</span>, but their starting GDPs are different.$

In a regime of superexponential growth, one country cannot outgrow the rest of the world if it is <50% world GDP and the other countries trade. (This graph uses the same hyperbolic growth equation as in the previous graph.)

Three scenarios for trade between the US and the rest of the world (RoW). 1) Unrestricted trade and the US doesn’t outgrow the world. 2) Sudden decoupling followed by the US outgrowing the world. 3) Gradual decoupling followed by the US outgrowing the world.

It’s easier to grow quickly if you’re behind the economic frontier as you can adopt technologies without discovering them yourself. This makes it harder for one country to outgrow the world. (Source __T3A_LINK_IN_POST__.)

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

LessWrong (30+ Karma)