Could AI robots replace human astronauts in space?

Technology can play a part in complementing human space travel by freeing up astronauts from certain tasks to allow them to focus on more important research. "[AI could be used to] automate tedious tasks," explains Dr Kiri Wagstaff, a computer and planetary scientist in the US who previously worked at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. "On the surface of a planet, humans get tired and lose focus, but machines won't." The challenge is that vast amounts of power are needed to operate systems like large language models (LLM), which can understand and generate human language by processing vast amounts of text data. "We are not at the point of being able to run an LLM on a Mars rover," says Dr Wagstaff.