Whoever records the world owns it
Physical AI needs a record of how skilled hands work. Europe has the hands. Whoever makes the record sets the terms for the robots.
Alberto Cantino, an agent of the Duke of Ferrara, was sent to Portugal officially to trade horses. In November 1502 he reported to his master on a different purchase: he had paid twelve gold ducats for a map. Portugal guarded its charts as state secrets, and this one showed what the secret was worth. It had the newly found coast of Brazil on it, and the line that divided the world beyond Europe between Portugal and Spain.
Ships went where the charts said, so whoever drew the chart decided what counted as a coast and whose it was. That contest has started again, and this time the territory is work. Physical AI, the kind that acts in the world instead of describing it, needs a record of how things are actually handled: how a hand seats a screw or turns a patient in a bed. Whoever makes that record sets the terms for everyone who builds on it. Europe is rich in exactly this material and is looking the other way.
What physical AI lacks
The text that language models learned from was already written and lay on the open web for the taking. No such library exists for manual work, and none can be typed up now, because very little of a skill survives being written down. World models, and the world action models that turn them into movement, have to be fed with recordings of the work itself.
America owns the computers. The research group Epoch AI credits the United States with about 75% of the AI supercomputing power it could trace, and China with 15%. What America lacks is the footage.
In October 2026 NPR reported from Karur, in southern India, where textile workers pack aprons with cameras on their heads and others film themselves doing housework. Those paid for it get about $2.60 an hour. One textile worker said nobody had told her what the footage was for. Most clients for the household recordings are in America. The country with three-quarters of the machines is learning housework from Tamil Nadu.
China has the factories and the robots. In 2024 it installed 295,000 industrial robots, 54% of the world’s total, by the count of the International Federation of Robotics. America installed 34,200.
China also knows what it is missing. In Beijing a centre of 10,000 square metres has opened where humanoid robots practise in 16 staged settings, a care home among them, and produce more than six million data points a year. A staged care home has no patients in it. Mass production works by taking judgment out of the task, which is its genius and makes it a poor teacher of judgment.
A law and a lament
Europe’s AI strategy so far amounts to a law and a lament. The law is the AI Act, in force since 1 August 2024. The lament is about chips and cloud, and the numbers support it: European providers hold about 15% of their own continent’s cloud market, down from 29% in 2017. The law governs models mostly built elsewhere, and the lament envies the machines they run on. Neither looks at what Europe has.
Germany’s craft register lists more than a million businesses. In Switzerland two-thirds of young people start out in vocational training. Add the hospital wards, the restaurant kitchens, the dental laboratories and the watch benches of Geneva, where I co-founded an independent watch house, and few places can match that stock of trained hands. Skill does not appear on a balance sheet, so nobody counts it. Each of those workplaces holds what physical AI cannot get from a data centre or a production line.
Recorded on Europe’s terms, that stock is an asset: the worker agrees and is paid, and the workshop licenses the record instead of handing it over. Recorded on someone else’s terms it is a giveaway, and Karur shows the going rate. Making such a record is the business of Archaí Physics, which I co-founded. Its first device sits on the head like a pair of headphones and is still in development. At OptAI in Zürich we work on the world models that will need it.
Data has no passport
Data, the objection runs, has no nationality. Record what you like and it will flow to the best model, which will be American or Chinese. That was true of text, because the text already existed and nobody had to ask. A skill has to be recorded in the room, with the person present, by someone who chose the sensors and wrote the licence. A file can be copied without limit, which is exactly why the first contract is the one that counts.
Standards follow the record. When delegates met in Washington in 1884 to pick a prime meridian, they chose Greenwich by 22 votes to one. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s ships already sailed by charts drawn from it, and the majority saw no reason to redraw them. Models will come and go. The format in which a continent’s skill was first written down will stay, and so will the name on the licence.
Portugal drew the map and Ferrara got it for twelve ducats. It has never gone home. It is in Modena.
The pictures in this essay were made with AI.