Call me optimistic, I'm a fan of the strong robot economy, where large-scale robot automation and artificial intelligence teams up to deliver us from evil and bring about a comparative paradise. But there will be pain, and not everyone is convinced the pain will be temporary. While science fiction has focused on the existential threat of AI to humans, researchers at Google's parent company, Alphabet, and those from Amazon.com, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft have been meeting to discuss more tangible issues, such as the impact of AI on jobs, transportation and even warfare. In recent years, however, the AI field has made rapid advances in areas, from self-driving cars and machines that understand speech, like Amazon's Echo device, to a new generation of weapons systems that threaten to automate combat.