[macavity23]

I actually am, but not about AI becoming smarter than us, or the 'singularity', for good reasons others have already stated.

I'm concerned what happens when human-sized combat robots become capable of defeating a trained and motivated human opponent. Such a thing is certainly a way off, but requires no fundamental advances in our understanding (very much unlike skynet/singularity-style general AI) so I see it as a certainty sooner or later, and the way everything is going probably sooner.

Throughout human history, the inherent power the rich have over the poor has had an equally-inherent counterpower: there are many more poor people, and if the rich make things too miserable for them, if they all rise up together, they will win. To my knowledge this is a universal in human history (please prove me wrong!), and in general tyrants and elites everywhere have to devote SOME of their resources at least to maintaining the 'general welfare', which is really a nice way of saying 'giving the poor enough to stop them rising up and taking our stuff'.

If robots become capable of beating serious human opponents one-on-one, then I think this age-old balance changes, because once you can build one such robot, you can build a hundred thousand, and what are the poor people going to do about that?