On March 26, 2015 Steve Omohundro gave a talk in the IBM Research 2015 Distinguished Speaker Series at the Accelerated Discovery Lab, IBM Research, Almaden. Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Baidu, Foxconn, and others have recently made multi-billion dollar investments in artificial intelligence and robotics. Some of these investments are aimed at increasing productivity and enhancing coordination and cooperation. Others are aimed at creating strategic gains in competitive interactions. This is creating “arms races” in high-frequency trading, cyber warfare, drone warfare, stealth technology, surveillance systems, and missile warfare. Recently, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and others have issued strong cautionary statements about the safety of intelligent technologies. We describe the potentially antisocial “rational drives” of self-preservation, resource acquisition, replication, and self-improvement that uncontrolled autonomous systems naturally exhibit. We describe the “Safe-AI Scaffolding Strategy” for developing these systems with a high confidence of safety based on the insight that even superintelligences are constrained by the laws of physics, mathematical proof, and cryptographic complexity. “Smart contracts” are a promising decentralized cryptographic technology used in Ethereum and other second-generation cryptocurrencies. They can express economic, legal, and political rules and will be a key component in governing autonomous technologies. If we are able to meet the challenges, AI and robotics have the potential to dramatically improve every aspect of human life.