[patrickk]

"Strong AI would presumably have military applications too, or could allow rogue nations to outcompete economically if they had 'friendly' strong AI."

If you wish to explore this further, you may like to read the books behind the Halo video games, they're surprisingly good. For example, one of the books has an AI character, a cowboy, who controls the agricultural systems on a food-producing planet called Harvest.

Of course, there's also Cortana, one of the main characters from the Halo universe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana