Last week, Amazon.com Inc held its first-ever conference devoted to the technological frontiers of AI, machine learning, robotics and space exploration. The message: The future is good, and so is Amazon’s role in it. 

The event in Las Vegas was not the time nor place for talk of trade wars, techlash or the US government’s renewed antitrust scrutiny of Amazon and the other tech giants. Instead, the e-commerce and cloud company debuted its streamlined and supposedly ready-to-fly package delivery drones, showed off Alexa’s new conversational abilities and revealed the latest version of its disc-shaped Pegasus warehouse robots (which apparently also cater parties).