Dava Newman: Role of AI in Space Travel

I love artificial intelligence. And I've also saw that you've enjoyed the movie Space Odyssey 2001 A Space Odyssey. Let me ask the question about HAL 9000 that makes a few decisions there that prioritizes the mission over the astronauts. Do you think from a high philosophical question, do you think HAL did the right thing of prioritizing the mission?

I think our artificial intelligence will be smarter in the future. For a Mars mission. It's a great question. The reality, isn't it? For a Mars mission we need fully autonomous systems. We will get humans, but they have to be fully autonomous. And that's a really important, that's the most important concept because you know there's not going to be a mission control on Earth, you know, you know, 20 minute time lag, there's just no way you're going to control it. So fully autonomous. So people have to be fully autonomous as well, but all of our systems as well. And so that's, that's the big design challenge. So that's why we test them out on the moon as well. When we have a, okay, a few seconds, you know, three second time lag, you can test them out. We have to really get autonomous exploration down. You asked me earlier about Magellan, Magellan and his crew, they, they left, right? They were autonomous. You know, they were autonomous. They left and they were on their own to figure out that mission. Then when they hit land, they have resources, that's institute resource utilization and everything else they brought with them. So we have to, I think, have that mindset for exploration again. Back to the moon, it's more the testing ground, the proving ground with technologies. But we're, when we get to Mars, it's so far away that we need fully autonomous systems. So I think that's, that's where again, AI and autonomy come in really robust autonomy. Things that we don't have today yet. So they're on the drawing boards, but we really need to test them out because that's, that's what we're up against.

So fully autonomous, meaning like self sufficient. There's still a role for the human in that picture. Do you think there'll be a time when AI systems just beyond doing fully autonomous flight control will also help or even take mission decisions like HAL did?

That's interesting. It depends. I mean, they're going to be designed by humans. I think as you mentioned, humans are always in the loop. I mean, we might be on Earth, we might be in orbit on Mars. Maybe the systems of landers down on the surface of Mars But I think we're going to get, we are right now just on Earth based systems, you know, AI systems that are incredibly capable and you know, training them with all the data that we have now, you know, petabytes of data from Earth. What I care about for the autonomy and AI right now, how we're applying it in research is to look at Earth and look at climate systems. I mean that's the. It's not for Mars. To me today, right now, AI is to eyes on Earth, all of our space data, compiling that using supercomputers. Because we have so much information and knowledge and we need to get that into people's hands. We need first there's educational issue with climate and our changing climate. Then we need to change human behavior. That's the biggie. So this next decade it's urgent we take care of our own spaceship, which is Spaceship Earth. So that's to me where my focus has been for AI systems using whatever is out there, kind of imagining also what the future situation is. What's the satellite imagery of Earth, of the future. If you can hold that in your hands, that's going to be really powerful. Will that help people accelerate positive change for Earth and for us to live in balance with Earth? I hope so. And kind of start with the ocean systems, so oceans to land, to air and kind of using all the space data. So it's a huge role for artificial intelligence to help us analyze. I call it curating the data, using the data. It has a lot to visualizations as well.