Science has published a short profile of a woman named Vandi Verma. She is "one of the few people in the world who is qualified to drive a vehicle on Mars."
Briefly, recall a recent essay by Karen Levy and Tim Hwang called "Back Stage at the Machine Theater." That piece looked at the atavistic holdover of old control technologies—such as steering wheels—in vehicles that are actually computer-controlled.
There is no need for a human-manipulated steering wheel, in other words, other than to offer a psychological point of focus for the vehicle's passengers, to give them the feeling that they can still take over.
This is the "machine theater" that the title of their essay refers to: a dramaturgy made entirely of technical interfaces that deliberately produce a misleading illusion of human control. These interfaces are "placebo buttons," they write, that transform all but autonomous technical systems into "theaters of volition" that still appear to be under manual guidance.
I mention this essay here because the Science piece with which this post began also explains that NASA's rover program is being pushed toward a state of greater autonomy.
"One of Verma's key research goals," we read, "has been to give rovers greater autonomy to decide on a course of action. She is now working on a software upgrade that will let Curiosity be true to its name. It will allow the rover to autonomously select interesting rocks, stopping in the middle of a long drive to take high-resolution images or analyze a rock with its laser, without any prompting from Earth."
The implication here is that, as the Mars rover program becomes "self-driving," it will also be transformed into a vast "theater of volition," in Levy's and Hwang's formulation: that Earth-bound "drivers" might soon find themselves reporting to work simply to flip placebo levers and push placebo buttons as these vehicles go about their own business far away.