There’s an interesting story in the Times this morning about efforts to make robotic space probes more autonomous. The idea is that it would be nice to be able to explore the Solar System without the big delays introduced by light-speed communications lags. In the absence of an ansible, autonomous robots are the best way to accomplish this.
I don’t really have anything to add, I just wanted to note the article. I’m going to start posting more short link-y things, for a variety of reasons, and this is one such post.