Science News By Aaron Tremper 7/15/2026
In the movie WALL-E, some of the last Earthlings travel through the Kuiper Belt on the starship Axiom. For 700 years, a fully automated crew of robots has cared for them after our planet became uninhabitable. Running the ship is AUTO, an artificial intelligence system working to keep humans away — forever.
Here at home, space agencies such as NASA are using AIs to explore the solar system. They are piloting rovers on Mars, preventing satellite collisions and training astronauts for spaceflight. But for now, spacefaring humans would be ill-advised to rely so heavily on AI.
Today’s AIs are much more prone to mistakes and failure than what you see in fiction, says Daniele Gammelli, a roboticist at Stanford University who studies how to integrate AI systems into robots that interact with their environments.
AI systems in space robots would need to complete multistep tasks in all sorts of scenarios without making up inaccurate information. In space, Gammelli says, “you have virtually no room for error.”
More:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-task-completion-ability-space-scifi
