The next AI race isn’t about smarter machines. It’s about human experience.

If you want to glimpse the future of artificial intelligence, don’t start in Silicon Valley. Start in a South Korean factory.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, South Korea now has 1,012 industrial robots for every 10,000 manufacturing workers — the highest robot density in the world. Put another way, roughly one in every 10 manufacturing “workers” is now a robot.

For now, however, even the world’s most advanced humanoid robots still struggle with tasks that young children perform effortlessly.

That startling figure is one piece of a much larger story stretching from American AI labs to South Korean factories, Chinese assembly lines, and Indian garment workshops.

For most Americans, the AI revolution is something that happens on a screen. We think of ChatGPT writing emails, Claude summarizing