While American politicians race to impose data center bans and endless layers of AI restrictions -- while also now entertaining the idea of “robot taxes,” -- the Robot Olympics were held in China this week. You may have seen some of the video clips from the games this week on social media and laughed as some of the robots wiped out, or even just failed to work at all. You shouldn't laugh too hard. As Yascha Mounk notes in his dispatch from Beijing, “There are few Westerners at the Robot Games; both the engineers and the spectators are mostly Chinese.” He asked two engineering students from Europe “Can the robots at your university do anything like this?” “No,” one of them answered, looking a little deflated. “They’re way ahead of us here.” And the Chinese are way ahead of America, too. So, while those robots may look silly today as they stumble and fall, the Chinese developers are learning fast from all that experimentation. Some of their humanoid bots are already superior to humans in many competitions. How do you think this plays out for the United States in the end if we continue to fall behind? We're currently living in a nation where China's DJI already controls 80% of our commercial drone market because our misguided policy choices wouldn't let American entrepreneurs get their innovations off the ground (quite literally). So, the Chinese already have the flying robot market firmly in hand even though America could have been the global leader there. And now American leaders -- especially state and local officials -- are looking to regulate and tax AI and embodied AI (robotics) into the ground. That'll just make Chinese global dominance of robotics even easier. Because AI and robotics are the most important dual-use technologies of this era, these policy decisions have massive ramifications for our nation's technology base and, by extension, our security. As they say, progress is a choice. National security is an even bigger one. America is choosing badly. writing.yaschamounk.com/p/a-…