By-Pass the Moon?

On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 6:56 AM, Dan Wylie-Sears wrote:
> But what's the big barrier to a completely automated mining process?

AI. (Not that an automated miner needs to pass the Turing test, but it
needs to be much smarter than today's robots.) This in turn is partly
a matter of software design and partly a matter of computing power.
The good news is that progress is being made in both areas.

Or put another way: if you want to support technological progress
contributing to space settlement, one way to do it is to spend more
money on computer hardware.