Disclaimer: This approach works for me. It may not work for you, but also maybe gives you some ideas.

I find the signal to noise ratio on social media and news sites/apps too low for me to have a consistently good experience on them. So, I developed an alternative, heavily curated approach to an information diet that I’m laying out here in hope people will give me suggesions over time to improve it.

It involves four main inputs:

* RSS, skewed towards “most upvoted” feeds

I use Reeder because it has a polished user interface, formats the feed in an aggregated, chronological timeline across devices, and has native reddit and filtering support, but there are many other RSS readers too.

I subscribe to around 25 feeds and 25 subreddits through Reeder. To increase the signal to noise, I try to find “most upvoted” feeds where possible. For example, for subreddits, I usually use the top posts for the week, which you can get for any subreddit like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/economics/top.rss?t=week (just replace ‘economics’ with the subreddit of your choice). Doing so will get you on the order of five top posts per day, but you can also change ‘week’ to ‘day’ to increase that number to about twenty or to ‘month’ to decrease it to about one, which I do for some feeds. To find generally interesting subreddits I looked through the top few hundred subreddits, and then I also added some niche subreddits for specific interests I have.

Below is part of my reddit list (alphabetical). You can see I have some really large subreddits (technology, science, todayilearned) mixed in with more niche ones (singularity, truereddit), as well as communities (rootsofprogress, slatestarcodex) and hobbies (phillyunion, usmnt). Getting about twenty five across a range of your interests makes a good base feed.

Many publications still have RSS feeds if you search for publication name+RSS. If they don’t, it’s likely RSS.app or Feedspot has made one you can use instead. There is usually support through one of these methods for sub-section publication feeds, for example the tech section.

Here are some other examples of non-reddit “most upvoted” feeds that might be more widely appealing:

* Hacker News RSS - for example, I added the 300 and 600 points feeds, meaning you get notified when a story hits 300 or 600 points (you can pick any number).

* NYT RSS - they have most emailed/shared/viewed

* Techmeme RSS - curated by the techmeme team

* LessWrong RSS - they have a curated feed

Then I also just consume the main RSS feeds of some really high signal publications like Ars Technica (full articles come through for subscribers), The Information, Quanta, etc.

Even with all this curation, the signal to noise for me isn’t that great. I skim through the timeline mostly, but I do end up getting a bunch of interesting articles this way every day. I do use the filtering feature of Reeder to drop out some really low hit keywords.

* Podcasts

I subscribe to about 20 podcasts via Overcast. I like the Overcast “Voice Boost (clear, consistent volume)” and “Smart Speed (shorter silences)” features as well as the ability to do a custom playback speed for each podcast.

The signal to noise ratio is better here than the RSS feeds, but I still don’t listen to every episode, and for ones I do I often skip around. I like having a queue to listen to in the car and at the gym.

I find new podcast discovery pretty hard. I’ve looked through the Overcast top podcasts lists in all the different categories, and tried lots of them, but not many stick for me.

* Email newsletters

I subscribe to about the same amount (20-25) of email newsletters, some daily but most weekly or less. Signal/noise is less than podcasts, but greater than the RSS feeds. I’d guess my hit rate is about 20% in terms of reading them through vs. maybe 50% for podcasts listening through and 5% for the full RSS amalgamation reading through.

About half of the email newsletters I subscribe to are through Substack and half are direct from websites/organizations.

* People sending me links

I really appreciate when people send me curated links, which happens less than I’d like but I can’t complain because the signal to noise here is the highest with a hit ratio maybe 80%. I try to encourage it by saying thank you and responding when I have thoughts.

With those four inputs, I feel decently covered, but sometimes I do wonder what I’m missing out on and occasionally relapse back to going directly to a news or social media app and skimming the front page. This method of course depends on having a good list of feeds, podcasts, and newsletters. But in general, I’m personally happier with this approach, though of course your mileage my vary. If you’re doing something similar and have any ideas on process tweaks or specific recommendations for feeds, podcasts, or newsletters, I’d love to hear them.

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In response to “A U.S.-China tech tie is a big win for China because of its population advantage,” I received feedback along the lines of shouldn’t we be looking at China’s working-age population and not their overall population? I was trying to keep it simple in that post, but yes, we should, and when we do, we find, unfortunately, that China’s population advantage still persists. Here’s the data:

Currently, China’s working-age population is over 4 times the U.S.

According to Our World in Data, China’s working-age population is 983 million to the U.S.’s 223 million, or 4.4x.

In 2050, despite being in rapid decline, China’s working-age population is still projected to be over 3 times the U.S.’s

The projections put China’s 2050 working-age population at 745 million to the U.S.’s 232 million, or 3.2x.

In 2075, noting projections are more speculative, China’s working-age population is still projected to be about double the U.S.’s

The projections put China’s 2075 working-age population at 468 million to the U.S.’s 235 million, or 2.0x.

Noah Smith recently delved into this rather deeply in his post “China’s demographics will be fine through mid-century” noting:

China’s economic might is not going to go “poof” and disappear from population aging; in fact, as I’ll explain, it probably won’t suffer significant problems from aging until the second half of this century.

And even in the second half, you can’t count on their demographic decline then either, both because even by 2075 their working-age population is still projected to be double the U.S.’s under current conditions, but also because those conditions are unlikely to hold. As Noah also notes:

Meanwhile, there’s an even greater danger that China’s leaders will panic over the country’s demographics and do something very rash…All in all, the narrative that demographics will tip the balance of economic and geopolitical power away from China in the next few decades seems overblown and unrealistic.

OK, why does this demographic stuff matter again?

Check out my earlier article for details, but here’s a summary.

[A] U.S.-China tech tie is a big win for China because of its population advantage. China doesn’t need to surpass us technologically; it just needs to implement what already exists across its massive workforce. Matching us is enough for its economy to dwarf ours. If per person output were equal today, China’s economy would be over 4× America’s because China’s population is over 4× the U.S. That exact 4× outcome is unlikely given China’s declining population and the time it takes to diffuse technology, but 2 to 3× is not out of the question. China doesn’t even need to match our per-person output: their population will be over 3× ours for decades, so reaching ⅔ would still give them an economy twice our size since 3 × ⅔ = 2.

…With an economy a multiple of the U.S., it’s much easier to outspend us on defense and R&D, since budgets are typically set as a share of GDP.

…What if China then starts vastly outspending us on science and technology and becomes many years ahead of us in future critical technologies, such as artificial superintelligence, energy, quantum computing, humanoid robots, and space technology? That’s what the U.S. was to China just a few decades ago, and China runs five-year plans that prioritize science and technology.

…Our current per person output advantage is not sustainable unless we regain technological dominance.

…[W]e should materially increase effective research funding and focus on our own technology diffusion plans to upgrade our jobs and raise our living standards.

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If you don’t know about Total Factor Productivity (TFP), you probably should. It’s an economic concept that is arguably the most important driver of long-term economic prosperity. An International Monetary Fund (IMF) primer on TFP explains it like this (emphasis added):

It’s a measure of an economy’s ability to generate income from inputs—to do more with less…If an economy increases its total income without using more inputs…it is said to enjoy higher TFP [Total Factor Productivity].

TFP is an important macroeconomic statistic [because] improvements in living standards must come from growth in TFP over the long run. This is because living standards are measured as income per person—so an economy cannot raise them simply by adding more and more people to its workforce.

Meanwhile, economists have amassed lots of evidence that investments in capital have diminishing returns. This leaves TFP advancement as the only possible source of sustained growth in income per person, as Robert Solow, the late Nobel laureate, first showed in a 1957 paper.

So, it’s important. Critically important to long-term progress. To learn more about TFP, check out the full IMF primer referenced above and then this post I wrote about TFP titled “The key to increasing standard of living is increasing labor productivity,” which also has more links embedded in it. It explains how the only sustainable way to increase TFP is to “to invent new technology that enables workers to do more per hour.” And this is why I’m always going on and on about increasing research funding.

Let’s assume for a second that most people want more prosperity and that long-term prosperity does indeed primarily flow through Total Factor Productivity. Then why aren’t we talking about TFP a lot more? Why isn’t Total Factor Productivity front and center in our political agendas?

I think there are a host of reasons for that, including those I outlined in the paradox of progress. But another even simpler reason has to be that Total Factor Productivity is a terrible, inscrutable name, at least from the perspective of selling the concept to the mainstream public.

Every word of it isn’t great. It starts with “total,” which isn’t as off-putting as the other words, but doesn’t add much especially as the first word, let alone the fact that economists quibble that it isn’t an actual total. “Factor” seems like a math word and doesn’t add much either. And then you have “productivity,” which is confusing to most people because it has an unrelated colloquial meaning, and from a political perspective it also codes as job-cutting which is inherently unappealing.

Now, lots of economics jargon has similar problems, case in point “Gross Domestic Product” (GDP). Given GDP hasn’t been rebranded, I doubt TFP will either. That said, I think for anyone trying to communicate this concept to the public, we shouldn’t take the TFP name or acronym as a given, but try to use something more appealing and inherently understandable.

I’m looking to switch to something else but not sure to exactly what. My thinking so far has led me to work in the words “prosperity” or “innovation” directly like:

* Prosperity Driver

* Prosperity Component

* Innovation Multiplier

Do you have any other suggestions?

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Fifteen years ago Google started using their search monopoly to create a browser monopoly by pushing people to use Chrome through in-product promotions in Google search. It worked. Now they’re repeating that same playbook for consumer AI with Gemini and it’s working again.

In the last 30 days, Gemini has been downloaded about the same amount of times as ChatGPT, and nothing else is even close.

While ChatGPT had a massive head start, Google is rapidly turning consumer AI into a duopoly. Despite endless headlines mentioning Anthropic, Perplexity, and others, none of the alternatives seem to be meaningfully gaining market share right now relative to ChatGPT, except Gemini. The reason is simple: the others don’t have the distribution channels to match Google’s.

The next phase of consumer AI competition will favor Google even more. As I recently noted, consumer internet workflows increasingly span across search, browsing, and AI. Who has the most entrenched position in search and browsing to complement consumer AI? Google. For example, their monopoly browser (Chrome) can get AI features to most consumers the fastest.

Google’s ability to leverage its market position to distribute its own AI products continues unabated, and U.S. v. Google made clear that distribution powers a scale advantage. That is, Google’s search assets are not easily replicable because of the vast user engagement data Google alone possesses. And an increasing number of sites don’t even allow web crawlers or access to their content except for Google.

We shouldn’t settle for a shift from Google’s search monopoly to an AI duopoly. Thus far, regulators have only addressed Google’s advantages at the margins. There remains time to address these dynamics and unlock innovation.

One possible (non-regulatory) response is deeper partnerships and consolidation between the other AI companies, search engines, and browsers in an effort to compete more with more scale in this new market. This has already started around the edges, for example we (at DuckDuckGo) have partnered with You.com to develop a better news search index and are looking to partner with others to advance the web index we’ve been working on, as well as to enhance our browser and AI features. But the market is ripe for larger deals.

To see where those might come from, here’s the top mobile (consumer AI is used primarily on mobile) search engines in the U.S. according to Cloudflare, who sees the most traffic. Google is #1, followed by us (DuckDuckGo) at #2, then Yahoo and Bing. Everyone else is sub 1%.

Similarly, here’s the top mobile browsers in the U.S. Safari and Chrome dominate, followed by Samsung Internet, DuckDuckGo and Firefox above 1%.

And finally, here are the top 20 consumer web destinations in the U.S., according to SEMRush. The top ten are Google, Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Instagram, DuckDuckGo, and ChatGPT.

Partnerships and consolidation between these companies could produce some more effective competition. So far, consumer AI has actually driven more traditional search and browser usage, not less. We see that in our numbers, and SparkToro reports similar for others. AI is driving people to do more information seeking in general, and as mentioned those workflows increasingly span across search, browsing, and AI. The best experiences seamlessly blend all three in the browser, and so it is natural companies with assets in some of the three areas would want to partner with companies with non-overlapping assets. Additionally, a company with a large consumer user base could help directly drive distribution of consumer AI, browsers, and search engines, especially if that company has unique content assets.

A duopoly in consumer AI will not just be bad for innovation, but will further erode privacy. That’s why I believe DuckDuckGo will remain an important alternative regardless of what happens, but I’m still a little hopeful that innovative partnerships and consolidation could challenge the rapidly emerging consumer AI duopoly.

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Progress doesn’t have a single agreed-upon definition, but for the sake of anchoring, let’s say progress is rising living standards. While this definition seems unambiguously good, deserving of top billing on policy agendas for both major parties, the paradox is that long-term progress agendas rarely get top billing. Why? Here are three underlying reasons I’ve noticed in thinking about advocating for a lot more basic research funding, which I think needs to be the cornerstone of any credible progress agenda:

* Timescale mismatch. People want benefits now, not decades from now. U.S. politics runs on two-year cycles, while progress policies need decades to compound into large increases in living standards. For example, 2% vs. 3% growth, which would be a great outcome for a progress agenda, seems like a rounding error to most people even though it is meaningful when compounded. And the politicians championing these policies won’t be around to claim credit when they pay off decades later.Resolving this part of the paradox would involve articulating short-term benefits in some manner, for example that research funding is a jobs engine in the short term. It could also involve bundling longer-term investments like research funding in a particular field with shorter-term concrete results like rollout projects in that same field, which people can start seeing the phsyical results from within a couple of years.

* Change aversion. Advocating for far-future progress is selling a sci-fi world, which a lot of people take (and creative media often depict) as dystopian, not utopian. True progress means society changes for the better, delivering better-paid jobs using more advanced technology, and products that bring new conveniences and experiences. But change also means at least some disruption of current ways of life and thinking, and that creates winners and losers in the short term, which in turn creates reasonable anxiety.Resolving this part of the paradox would involve painting a clearer picture of what exactly will change in the short term, paired with explicit transition support for people most directly affected. It could also involve less focus on the far-future altogether, focusing instead on shorter timeframes that could be more easily contextualized.

* Lacking urgency. Not only is there not a clear picture, but progress agenda framing lacks urgency, emphasizing future opportunities rather than short-term crisis. Crisis framing comes with inherent urgency that opportunity framing lacks.Resolving this part of the paradox would involve reframing progress agendas as a response to crisis, such as the risk of China leapfrogging us in critical technology and the military and economic consequences that brings.

All these resolutions share a common thread: making distant abstractions concrete. I’m increasingly convinced that advocating for progress, whether it be basic research funding or otherwise, requires bundling long-term promises with near-term demonstrations, including explicit workforce transition plans, and framing progress as helping to address competitive threats we’re already facing.

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The browser wars are back. Agents are one front; the overlooked front is reducing switching costs in workflows that bridge across search, browse, and AI.

Overlapping search, browse, and AI in the browser

Traditional web search, browsing, and AI chatting aren’t going away, even as many people will eventually start interacting more with agents that automate tasks. And all three of these core Internet activities increasingly overlap into complex workflows. Many queries you could start either with a web search or an AI chat, and many of those end with wanting to browse to a website. Sometimes you’re on a website and want to ask a question about it. Sometimes you are in a chat and want to run a related web search, and vice versa.

The best product lets you complete whole tasks with the least friction. Agents are one approach. The other approach, which keeps users in the driver seat, is to seamlessly integrate search, browse, and AI into one interface. Both are important fronts in the new browser wars.

The DuckDuckGo Browser

We’ve been working on AI at DuckDuckGo for several years now, with an overall approach to provide private, useful, and optional AI features—including chat and search instant answers—to people who want the productivity benefits of AI without the privacy risks. Our chat service at duck.ai, which allows you to chat privately with popular chatbots and get real-time answers from the web, has the highest satisfaction ratings we’ve ever seen in a new service, and Search Assist, our take on Google’s AI Overviews, is currently our highest-rated search feature.

While we’re the second largest search engine on mobile in the U.S., we’re also the 4th largest mobile browser (and #3 on iOS specifically). In fact, we think of ourselves as a browser company at this point. I believe the best search, AI chat, and web user experience is where they are all integrated deeply in the browser (vs. in separate apps or services), supporting workflows that allow you to seamlessly move between modes as needed.

Seamless workflows: what we’re creating at DuckDuckGo

I believe our browser is so popular because we focus not just on protection but on also continually refining the user experience, aiming for both dependability and delight. That’s why we have been actively working on creating such seamless workflows across search, browse, and AI for some time now. Here are a few examples.

Easily accessible AI chat sidebar

We have a sidebar in our desktop browser that is easily accessible from any webpage to ask an AI chat question, optionally using page context. From there, you can ask follow-ups, pop it out into a new tab if you need more space, or hide it to return to give more room to the website without losing your place.

Toggle between Duck.ai and search via address bar / homepage

We now have an optional address bar mode on mobile (coming to desktop next) that allows you to easily toggle between private web search and private AI chat when starting queries. Ideally this makes it just as easy to start a web search or an AI chat as in a standalone search or chat app, and further allows you to switch modes mid-query without re-typing.

The toggle is also available on (or coming soon to) our homepage and new tab page.

Handoff between search results and chat

If you start a web search, we’ve built in ways to more easily jump into chat mode if desired. You can click Duck.ai to go into AI mode, or the chat icon from within Search Assist to ask a specific follow-up question related to the answer, which will carry over the answer and sources as context.

Integrating traditional search into Duck.ai

From within Duck.ai chat conversations, we automatically search the web for you and provide links to related searches or websites when appropriate, allowing you to jump back into search or browse mode if desired.

We’re working on refining these features based on user feedback as well as designing more. The best user experience will improve the workflows of the many people that are bouncing between these modes dozens of times a day. Your thoughts are welcomed!

Keeping AI private and optional

As mentioned, our overall approach to AI features is to keep them useful, private, and optional. The above illustrates usefulness, so now a few closing words on private and optional. Similar to our search engine, our AI chats are anonymized. In addition, chats are not used to train AI models. There’s a lot more about private AI chats on our help pages.

We also make sure everything we do with AI is optional, since we know not all of our users want to use AI for a variety of reasons, and that is fine with us. All AI features can be turned off, in both our browser and our search engine.

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I previously called on Congress to ban AI surveillance because of its heightened potential to easily manipulate people, both for commercial and ideological ends. Essentially, we need an AI privacy law.

Yet Congress has stalled on general privacy legislation for decades, even in moments of broad public privacy focus, like after the Snowden revelations and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So, instead of calling for another general privacy bill that would encompass AI, I believe we should focus on an AI-specific privacy bill.

Many of the privacy frameworks floated over the years for general privacy regulation could essentially be repurposed to apply more narrowly to AI. For example, one approach is to enumerate broad consumer AI rights, such as rights of access, correction, deletion, portability, notice, transparency, opt-out, human review, etc., with clear processes to exercise those rights. Another approach is to create legally binding duties of care and/or loyalty on organizations that hold AI data, requiring them to protect consumers' interests regarding this data, such as to minimize it, avoid foreseeable harm, prohibit secondary use absent consent or necessity, etc.

There are more approaches out there and they are not mutually exclusive. While I have personal thoughts on some of them, my overriding goal is to get something, anything useful passed, and so I remain framework-agnostic. However, I believe within whatever framework Congress adopts, certain fundamentals are non-negotiable:

* Ban a set of clearly harmful practices. Start with what (I hope are) universal agreement items, like identity theft, deceptive impersonation, unauthorized deepfakes, etc. The key is explicitly defining this as a category so that we can debate politically harder cases like personalized pricing and predictive policing (both of which I think should also be banned).

* Practices near the ban threshold should face higher scrutiny. For example, if we can’t manage to outright ban using AI to assist in law enforcement decisions, at the very least this type of use should always be subject to human review, reasonable auditing procedures, etc. Using AI for consequential decisions, like for loan approvals, or for processing sensitive data, like health information, should at least be in this category. And many practices within this category, especially with regards to consumer AI, should be explicitly opt-in.

* Make everything else transparent and optional. Outside the bright-line bans and practices subject to higher scrutiny, any other AI profiling must be transparent and at least come with the ability to opt-out, with only highly limited exceptions where opt‑outs would defeat the purpose, like for legal compliance. Consumers also need meaningful transparency, including prominent disclosures that indicate clearly when you are interacting with an AI system. That means not just generic data collection notices or folding into existing privacy policies, but plain-language explanations shown (or spoken) prominently at the time of processing, which detail what AI systems are inferring and deciding.

* States must maintain authority to strengthen, not undermine, federal minimums. I wrote a whole post about why, with the gist being AI is changing rapidly, the federal government doesn’t react to these changes quickly enough, and states have shown they will act, both in AI and privacy.

Finally, these protections won't stifle progress. Some oppose any AI regulation because they believe it will hinder AI adoption or innovation. In terms of innovation, privacy makes a good analogy: Despite fears that a “patchwork” of state privacy laws would wreak havoc on innovation by going too far, they haven’t. Innovation hasn’t stalled, and neither have Big Tech privacy violations. In terms of adoption, the backlash against AI is real and rising, and smart regulation can help build the trust necessary for sustained AI adoption, not hinder it. We can get the productivity benefits of AI without the privacy harms.

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A couple weeks ago I wrote a post titled AI survelliance should be banned while there is still time. Someone submitted it to Hacker News where it got over 600 upvotes, so I decided to submit it myself to reddit (on /r/technology) where it got over 1,100 upvotes.

Because I submitted it, I was able to get “Post Insights” (pictured above, left) that indicated the post got 175,000 views. Similarly, substack reports “Traffic sources” (pictured above, right) and shows 310 views came from reddit. This roughly 1:500 ratio is consistent with others I’ve gathered across several different posts and subreddits, so I don’t think it is particularly anomalous. Reddit views count impressions (when posts appear in feeds), making this ratio also comparable to other platforms.

The bottom line is lots of views on social doesn’t equate to lots of clicks, and certainly not lots of email subscribers, which experiences another 1:100 type of ratio, that is, clicks to email subscribers. My takeaways:

* Social ≠ list growth. Social posts don't build email lists: social post views to new email subscribers is likely less than 50,000 to 1 (500 x 100).

* Optimize the headline. If you do chase social views, nail the headline since that's where 99% of the value lives given almost nobody clicks through. For example, you could expose your brand name or logo, or just raise awareness for a crisp point or concept you can fit in a headline.

0.2% is common for ads; I expected higher for a top organic post on a popular subreddit, but this data suggests otherwise. Of course, your mileage may vary, but I thought it would nevertheless be helpful to put out a real data point I found interesting.

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China’s population is declining, but UN projections show it will remain at least twice the size of the U.S. for decades.

So what?

Population size matters because economy size (GDP) matters and GDP = population × output per person. For example:

* 100 million people × $50,000 per year = a $5 trillion economy

* 1 billion people × $50,000 per year = a $50 trillion economy

Then why hasn’t China’s economy already dwarfed America’s?

It’s because China’s output per person is still much lower than America’s. China has about 4× the people but about ¼ the output per person. 4 × ¼ = 1. This means that by any standard GDP measure, such as market exchange rates or Purchasing Power Parity, the two economies are in the same ballpark today.

OK, but why is China’s economic output per person so much lower than America’s?

A primary reason is that large swaths of its workforce aren’t yet at the technological frontier. About 23% of Chinese workers are in agriculture vs. about 1½% in the U.S. However, if China continues to educate its population, mechanize its workforce, and diffuse technology across it, that gap will continue to narrow and per-worker output will continue to climb. Only a decade ago, over 30% of China’s workforce was in agriculture, and per-person output has grown much faster than in the U.S. for decades.

Technology is the driving force enabling China to catch up with the U.S. in economic output per person. As long as China diffuses increasingly sophisticated technology through its workforce significantly faster than in the U.S., then it will keep raising output per person relative to the U.S., growing its economy faster. Diffusion is not automatic; it depends on continued private-sector dynamism and sound policy. It isn’t guaranteed, but it is certainly plausible, if not likely.

Put another way, a U.S.-China tech tie is a big win for China because of its population advantage. China doesn't need to surpass us technologically; it just needs to implement what already exists across its massive workforce. Matching us is enough for its economy to dwarf ours. If per person output were equal today, China’s economy would be over 4× America’s because China’s population is over 4× the U.S. That exact 4× outcome is unlikely given China’s declining population and the time it takes to diffuse technology, but 2 to 3× is not out of the question. China doesn't even need to match our per-person output: their population will be over 3× ours for decades, so reaching ⅔ would still give them an economy twice our size since 3 × ⅔ = 2.

Some may recall similar predictions about Japan in the 1980s that never materialized. But China is fundamentally different: Japan's population peaked at less than ½ the U.S., while China's is over 4× ours. Japan’s workforce had already reached the technological frontier when it stalled out, while China is still far behind with massive room to catch up.

And what does China win exactly?

China wins a much bigger economy. With an economy a multiple of the U.S., it’s much easier to outspend us on defense and R&D, since budgets are typically set as a share of GDP. Once China’s economy is double or triple ours, trying to keep up would strain our economy and risk the classic guns-over-butter trap. (This is the same trap that contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse: too much of its economy steered toward military ends.) Alliances could help offset raw population scale, but only if we coordinate science, supply chains, and procurement, which we have not achieved at the needed scale.

What if China then starts vastly outspending us on science and technology and becomes many years ahead of us in future critical technologies, such as artificial superintelligence, energy, quantum computing, humanoid robots, and space technology? That’s what the U.S. was to China just a few decades ago, and China runs five-year plans that prioritize science and technology.

What can we do about it?

Our current per person output advantage is not sustainable unless we regain technological dominance. By dominance, I don’t mean a few months ahead like today’s AI cycles. I mean many years ahead in developing, diffusing, and commercializing frontier science and technology.

My takeaway: we need to recognize how quickly we are losing our privileged position to China. If its economy doubles or triples ours, it can outspend us to lock in technological and military dominance. That may not happen, but we shouldn’t bet on it. Instead, we should materially increase effective research funding and focus on our own technology diffusion plans to upgrade our jobs and raise our living standards.

What about AI automation?

The net job effect of AI automation is hotly debated, but any outcome doesn’t change this calculus. If employment levels remain about the same then the status quo population advantage remains. If net jobs drop dramatically due to an AI-dominated economy, staying ahead in AI systems becomes even more important. So, either way, doing more effective research and development is critical.

This should be the most important and bipartisan political issue. Research and technology diffusion isn’t everything, but it is the cornerstone of future prosperity. If we don’t get it right, we definitely lose, and we’re currently not getting it right.

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All the same privacy harms with online tracking are also present with AI, but worse.

While chatbot conversations resemble longer search queries, chatbot privacy harms have the potential to be significantly worse because the inference potential is dramatically greater. Longer input invites more personal information to be provided, and people are starting to bare their souls to chatbots. The conversational format can make it feel like you’re talking to a friend, a professional, or even a therapist. While search queries reveal interests and personal problems, AI conversations take their specificity to another level and, in addition, reveal thought processes and communication styles, creating a much more comprehensive profile of your personality.

This richer personal information can be more thoroughly exploited for manipulation, both commercially and ideologically, for example, through behavioral chatbot advertising and models designed (or themselves manipulated through SEO or hidden system prompts) to nudge you towards a political position or product. Chatbots have already been found to be more persuasive than humans and have caused people to go into delusional spirals as a result. I suspect we’re just scratching the surface, since they can become significantly more attuned to your particular persuasive triggers through chatbot memory features, where they train and fine-tune based on your past conversations, making the influence much more subtle. Instead of an annoying and obvious ad following you around everywhere, you can have a seemingly convincing argument, tailored to your personal style, with an improperly sourced “fact” that you’re unlikely to fact-check or a subtle product recommendation you’re likely to heed.

That is, all the privacy debates surrounding Google search results from the past two decades apply one-for-one to AI chats, but to an even greater degree. That’s why we (at DuckDuckGo) started offering Duck.ai for protected chatbot conversations and optional, anonymous AI-assisted answers in our private search engine. In doing so, we’re demonstrating that privacy-respecting AI services are feasible. But unfortunately, such protected chats are not yet standard practice, and privacy mishaps are mounting quickly. Grok leaked hundreds of thousands of chatbot conversations that users thought were private. Perplexity’s AI agent was shown to be vulnerable to hackers who could slurp up your personal information. Open AI is openly talking about their vision for a “super assistant” that tracks everything you do and say (including offline). And Anthropic is going to start training on your chatbot conversations by default (previously the default was off). I collected these from just the past few weeks!

It would therefore be ideal if Congress could act quickly to ensure that protected chats become the rule rather than the exception. And yet, I’m not holding my breath because it’s 2025 and the U.S. still doesn’t have a general online privacy law, let alone privacy enshrined in the Constitution as a fundamental right, as it should be. However, there does appear to be an opening right now for AI-specific federal legislation, despite the misguided attempts to ban state AI legislation.

Time is running out because every day that passes further entrenches bad privacy practices. Congress must move before history completely repeats itself and everything that happened with online tracking happens again with AI tracking. AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time. No matter what happens, though, we will still be here, offering protected services, including optional AI services, to consumers who want to reap the productivity benefits of online tools without the privacy harms.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gabrielweinberg.com