iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 27/09/2026

High praise, as I’m a big fan of Colin’s work! Really interesting to see the courses offered on this topic

Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 21/07/2026

Unfortunately most of these recommendations end up having a flavor of giving up on building a growth engine at home and buying a small stake in growth that happens elsewhere, whether via attracting tourists or remittances. I hope I'm wrong. Full piece: newsletter.deenamousa.com/p/what-can-...

newsletter.deenamousa.com

What can poor countries sell in the AI age?

Looking for alternate export-led growth pathways

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 21/07/2026

This is, of course, sensitive to not only demand but also the politics of migration. And remittances aren't the same as a growing domestic industry; they mostly fund consumption and housing.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 21/07/2026

Rich countries are also aging into a permanent care shortage. This physical, relational work is among the hardest for AI to automate. Home health aides are the fastest-growing US job by a wide margin: +740k by 2034, nearly 3x the runner-up.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 21/07/2026

So why migration? Comparable workers (same age, schooling, experience) earn much more in the US than at home. If AI makes rich countries richer while that work stays human, that gap will only widen.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 21/07/2026

Selling clean energy runs into another issue: demand for green hydrogen is manufactured by regulation and hasn't manifested yet. ~90% of the world's announced 2030 supply has no financing behind it.X$

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 21/07/2026

Data centers look like an opening, since the US is blocking them amid local opposition. But for poor countries they mostly aren't exports: 80%+ of African data already sits abroad, a hyperscale campus hires ~150 people, and the margins go to the operator.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 21/07/2026

Tourism only works if you have something enticing for visitors. Even then, there's a limitation on demand and how many people you can serve. Of the US sectors tracked since 1990, accommodation and food is nearly the only one where hours grew faster than output/worker.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 21/07/2026

Another is agriculture - people need food, and AI is not growing it. But demand for food is capped, so when productivity rises, workers leave farming. And the real money is in the branding and marketing; farmers capture about 6.6 cents of every chocolate dollar.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 21/07/2026

Data labeling is a common suggestion. It's a job *created by* AI. But this is prone to wage competition; Filipino rates on some projects dropped from $10 a task to <$0.01. And demand is shifting up the skill chain to experts like lawyers, doctors, etc. in high income countries

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 21/07/2026

Export-led growth did 3 things: earned hard currency, employed huge numbers of people, and made those workers steadily more productive by doing the work. High revenues alone aren't enough if fewer and fewer people are employed by that industry, as I wrote in my last post.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 21/07/2026

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?

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 07/07/2026

But the same traits that make a job possible to offshore also make it especially automatable. While there's no sign of disruption looking at overall employment, new jobs in these fields are declining.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 07/07/2026

Now, services may be going down a similar path, as they face the prospect of AI automation. These are important parts of economies: India's tech industry earned $283 billion last year and employs 5.8 million people. Philippine BPO grosses $40 billion a year, over 8% of GDP.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 07/07/2026

Manufacturing employment used to peak when countries were already rich, at around $35,000 per capita for Britain, Sweden, Italy. But later industrializers are hitting the same peak at about $1,800.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 07/07/2026

Manufacturing as a path is already closing. The sector has gotten so competitive that the industry cannot create enough jobs. Bangladesh's garment exports tripled between 2010 and 2024, while employment in the sector stayed flat.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 07/07/2026

Why exports? Domestic consumers are too few and too poor, and new industries need imports priced in hard currency. Also, there's evidence of learning gains and productivity increases from exporting.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 07/07/2026

Every country that has sustained rapid growth since 1950 did it through exports - often moving from agriculture, to manufacturing, to services. South Korea went from $100 per capita to >$35,000 by exporting wigs, plywood, clothing, ships, steel, cars, and finally semiconductors.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 07/07/2026

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?

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 17/06/2026

The lesson is that we ought to be *far* more ambitious. Maintaining a rat-free province sounds impossible and onerous, and if attempted elsewhere would likely garner complaints about wasted taxpayer funds. But it turns out to be *cheaper* than half-hearted reactive measures.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 17/06/2026

Today Alberta mans a rat sighting hotline. Of 875 reports last year, only 47 were rats; Albertans have never seen the creature, so they often mistake squirrels for one. Officials tracked a pet rat down via a license plate in a FB photo. Another was reported by an ex (they re-homed it to BC!)

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 17/06/2026

But this was so obviously worth it: Neighboring Saskatchewan now spends C$1.2M/year on rat control and experiences C$15M in agricultural damage annually, while it only costs Alberta C$500K/year (< C$0.11/resident/year) to maintain elimination.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 17/06/2026

Not everyone complied: One mayor called the focus on rats a political distraction, and another insisted there were no rats in his town and said he'd eat any found there. (He changed his mind when officials showed up with a bushel caught at his local slaughterhouse.)

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 17/06/2026

This required a willingness to spend a lot of money (C$1.75M), time, and effort on what would seem to many to be a nuisance problem. It's hard to imagine most local governments rallying the resources necessary to do something this today.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 17/06/2026

They adopted Soviet-style war posters, hosted radio shows about the dangers of ignoring rats, and sent community educators to run town halls. One chewed on warfarin-treated oats while taking questions to assuage residents' concerns about the pesticide, so they'd stop throwing out treated traps.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 17/06/2026

Albertans - worried about disease and crops - called a state of emergency. They set up a 'Rat Control Zone' on the border, covered it in pesticides, and sent inspectors to set up watch. To rally enough people, some bureaucrats were reassigned from weed inspection to rat patrols.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 17/06/2026

The rats we're familiar with aren't native to North America. They hitched rides on ships with Europeans, and, by the late 1940s, they'd crossed Saskatchewan and were approaching Alberta's border at 24km/year.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 17/06/2026

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.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 04/06/2026

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...

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 26/05/2026

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

newsletter.deenamousa.com

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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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 19/05/2026

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

newsletter.deenamousa.com

The leading indicator graveyard

Nobody knows what 'AI exposure' means

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 12/05/2026

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

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 12/05/2026

open.substack.com/pub/deenamo...

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 12/05/2026

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.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 09/03/2026

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?

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 24/02/2026

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*

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 12/02/2026

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.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 11/02/2026

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.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 10/02/2026

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.

voxdev.org

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.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 06/02/2026

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

voxdev.org

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?

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 06/01/2026

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:

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Reposted by Deena Mousa

Tim Hirschel-Burns @timhirschelburns.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

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

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 22/12/2025

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.

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Deena Mousa @deenamousa.com · 15/10/2025

PainChek Adult was offered de novo FDA clearance this week, and engineers are now adapting the code for the very youngest patients. PainChek Infant targets babies under one year, whose grimaces flicker faster.

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