---
title: "Donkey-Like Martian Rovers Are About to Enter Service!"
description: "Yingjing Xu's scenario is a news dispatch from Houston, dated to the centenary of the Normandy landings, reporting that NASA's chimpanzees and poultry have died on Mars because their nursing robot relied on Earth-derived big data."
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Yingjing Xu"
published: "2025-11-21"
original_url: "https://hemstacks.antikythera.org/"
doi: "10.1162/ANTI.5D06"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks/martianrovers"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/journal/hemstacks/martianrovers"
last_updated: "2026-08-23"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Donkey-Like Martian Rovers Are About to Enter Service!

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Yingjing Xu
- **Published:** 2025-11-21
- **Kind:** Journal · Journal article
- **DOI:** https://doi.org/10.1162/ANTI.5D06
- **Original:** https://hemstacks.antikythera.org/
- **Length:** 958 words
- **Part of:** [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks)
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks/martianrovers
- **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23

## Summary

[Yingjing Xu](https://antikythera.wiki/people/yingjing-xu)'s scenario is a news dispatch from Houston, dated to the centenary of the Normandy landings, reporting that NASA's chimpanzees and poultry have died on Mars because their nursing robot relied on Earth-derived big data. The replacement is "Watney," a family of donkey-like rovers designed for "small dataism": modular, shape-shifting, fast-and-slow thinking, and meant to build underground habitats for settlers.

## The argument

Xu, a philosopher at Fudan, argues through the mouth of a project supervisor, Joseph Kim, that the Martian environment imposes four constraints that rule out the dominant AI paradigm: no human experts on site, narrow bandwidth to Earth, too little Martian data to train on, and dust that compromises silicon. Under those constraints, situational decision-making built from generalisable past experience "naturally reveals itself to be more tenable." The design follows. Hardware is standardised across a "vehicle family" so that specialisation is partly internalised and tools are temporary attachments; bodies vary from androids to snakes and centipedes; the reasoning module combines Kahneman's fast and slow thinking, with fast thinking deliberately not big-data-based so the rover can survive when there is no time to deliberate. Kim's closing remark carries the provocation: Mars may be a simpler testbed for general intelligence than an Earth home, because Earth's "microsociological environments" are harder.

## Section by section

The piece is a single press report with a byline, "Jack Xu from The Mars Settlement Center." It moves from the animal deaths to the four constraints, the vehicle-family philosophy, the donkey demonstration (artificial fur that senses dust storms tens of miles off, storm alerts issued to other robots, standard English for human riders), the reasoning module, and the plan for Watney-II to learn to raise poultry as a first step toward understanding human needs. The genre choice, a cheerful trade announcement, keeps the deaths and the inversion of Earth-centred AI in the background where the reader can find them.

## Key concepts

- **Small dataism** — an AI design stance for resource-scarce, unpredictable environments, relying on generalised experience rather than large domain-specific datasets.
- **Vehicle family** — the military logistics concept of shared components across models, used here to internalise specialisation in a common modular frame.
- **Fast and slow thinking** — Kahneman's distinction, implemented so that only the deliberative path depends on big data.

## Connections

Part of [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks). Long's [Underground Intelligence](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks/undergroundintelligence) is the inverse case, an intelligence formed by data abundance. The suggestion that general intelligence may be easier to develop off Earth than in a human home is a provocation aimed at the program's own debates about what intelligence is, as in [What Is Intelligence?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/what-is-intelligence).