Who Owns the Body? Robotics and the Next Frontier of Digital Sovereignty

Last year at SFSCON I argued that if AI is the mind, robotics is the body. This year: who owns the body?
Digital sovereignty is usually about data and the cloud. But as autonomous robots spread into logistics, cleaning, hospitality and agriculture, sovereignty becomes physical — and uncomfortable. At Telmekom we sell and deploy these robots today, and today the best platforms on the market are not European. There is no mature European alternative ready to ship, and a business serving real customers cannot wait for one: the warehouse, the hospital floor and the harvest don’t pause for industrial policy to catch up.
This talk makes the case for pragmatic sovereignty. The danger is not using foreign hardware — it is using it unconsciously, with no leverage and no exit. Naming the dependency is the first act of sovereignty, not a betrayal of it. The market gap is itself the argument for open standards: the realistic path to European capability runs through open middleware, auditable firmware and the right to repair — the layers that let a European integrator add value on foreign hardware now, and let European hardware plug in later without rebuilding the whole stack.
In fifteen minutes I’ll show what it means to buy the body abroad while keeping the nervous system — the software, the data, the ability to audit, repair and migrate — under your own control, and name concrete levers for decision-makers in regions like South Tyrol.