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Last updated Nov 29, 2025
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Friedberg @ 00:37:24Inconclusive
economy
If the EU and United States adopt a techno‑pessimistic, highly regulatory stance toward new technologies like AI while countries such as China embrace them, then over the coming years China’s GDP will grow significantly while U.S. GDP will stagnate relative to China.
And as a result, China's GDP will scale while the U.S will stagnate if that's where they go. That's my assessment or my opinion on what will happen.View on YouTube
Explanation

It is too early to judge this prediction as right or wrong.

Key parts of Friedberg’s claim:

  1. It is explicitly conditional and long‑term:

    • “If” the EU and U.S. adopt a techno‑pessimistic, highly regulatory stance on AI and
    • “over the coming years” China’s GDP will scale while U.S. GDP stagnates relative to China.

    As of November 30, 2025, less than one year has passed since the February 15, 2025 podcast. That is far too short to evaluate multi‑year structural GDP divergence.

  2. Policy condition is not clearly resolved yet:

    • The EU has indeed been moving toward heavy AI regulation via the EU AI Act, often cited as one of the world’s most restrictive AI regulatory frameworks.
    • The U.S. has taken a more fragmented approach: an AI Executive Order, sectoral proposals, and some state‑level rules, but not yet a comprehensive, clearly “techno‑pessimistic” regime. Policy direction is still evolving and contested.
    • China has been promoting rapid AI deployment within a state‑controlled framework, combining industrial policy support with content and safety regulations; whether this is best characterized as "embracing" vs. "constraining" AI is itself debated.

    Because the exact scenario he described (strongly pessimistic, highly regulatory U.S. and EU versus a clearly more liberal, growth‑oriented China) is still in flux, the antecedent of the “if…then…” prediction is not firmly in place yet.

  3. GDP outcomes have not had time to manifest in the structural way implied:

    • Real GDP levels and growth for 2024–2025 for the U.S. and China can be estimated or projected by IMF/World Bank/OECD data, but a single year or two of growth data cannot confirm a multi‑year structural stagnation of U.S. GDP relative to China driven specifically by AI regulatory stance.
    • Even if early data showed China growing somewhat faster or slower than the U.S., attributing that to AI regulatory philosophy (rather than real estate cycles, demographics, trade, fiscal policy, etc.) would be speculative at this stage.

Because:

  • the time horizon (“over the coming years”) has not elapsed,
  • the policy precondition is not fully realized or stable, and
  • GDP trends and causal attribution cannot yet be robustly assessed,

this prediction cannot be declared right or wrong at this time and is best classified as inconclusive.