It was hard to tell whether hope or fear was the predominant sentiment about the future of artificial intelligence, according to a panel discussing the state of the field at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday. A.I. systems are rapidly becoming more capable, the panel -- which included Ya-Qin Zhang, president of Chinese search engine company Baidu Inc., and Matthew Grob, the chief technology officer at Qualcomm Inc. -- agreed: they're able to learn from analyzing large data sets and they can increasingly discern human emotions by monitoring facial expressions and natural language. A.I. researchers Andrew Moore, the dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, were also on the panel and concurred that as a result, A.I. is likely to vastly improve human lives in the coming decade. But the researchers and executives voiced concern about possible downsides ranging from economic displacement to computers that escape the ability of humans to control them with potentially dire consequences. Using A.I. to improve search engine results has the potential to transform search from a 1 trillion industry today to a 10 trillion industry, Russell said.