Pat Flannery wrote:
At the moment; but what around twenty or thirty years in the future? We
are getting steadily better at automating things as well as
miniaturizing robotic devices, and you can see a point in the future
where robots pretty much can do everything a human explorer can do, as
well as having the dual advantages of not needing weighty life support
equipment or a means of returning home from its planetary target. Both

You realize that once missions at distances greater than the Moon are
undertaken, the robots would have to be autonomous or semi-autonomous.
The distances are so great that the delay in radio transmission would
make "hands on" control by a human impossible.

One really neat outcome of developing autnomous robots for space
exploration is that it would stimulate the development of AI at a
greater pace than AI has been enjoying.

Bob Kolker