>Where humans excel is on the spot decision making: looking around and saying "that looks interesting, I'm going to ignore the mission plan and go over there in

>Where humans excel is on the spot decision making: looking around and saying "that looks interesting, I'm going to ignore the mission plan and go over there instead" This is where the real advantage is. Intuitive curiosity is not something AI is anywhere near being able to replicate in a useful way. Plus being able to explain why something is interesting and worth investigating. Look at image recognition- even where it's extremely accurate, in the instances where it screws up, we topically have no idea why. (Like confusing a leopard with a hair brush.) Which in the context of exploration is not very useful. If we don't know why the AI finds a feature interesting, then how are we (or the AI itself) supposed to know what to do about it? How to further study it? Every other comparison between humans and robots is somewhat debatable depending on context and mission. Secondary is certainly reaction time, especially in the context of timely investigation. As someone mentioned elsewhere with large scale drilling, many types of equipment still require a human operator with near-realtime feedback to be used effectively and efficiently in a non-specialized manor. If a rover on Mars rolls around a boulder and spots a little green man, or a pink Martian rabbit, they're probably not going to hang around and wait to be studied. More likely, it might dig a hole, uncovering water or some other unknown material that's evaporated or sublimated before it gets instructions on how to react. Of course if it's a pink martian rabbit, we'll have to wait 8-12 years to develop and delete a new rover with trapping capabilities. :-)