Agreed. There is a lot of new tech out there that can be real game changers. Just look at the robotics being developed for military applications that are designed to work in cooperation with humans.
The mars rovers show the problem of robotics alone. The distance means that every inch a rover moves needs to be plotted in advance and then assessed and reassessed before the order is even sent. Then the rover creeps to its next destination and sits waiting for its next order. Everything the curiosity rover has done since landing on mars could have achieved in hours what it’s done in more than a year if there were a human a few miles away sending real time commands.
The value in sending humans is in our purely human traits like curiosity, intuition, and ability to reason. If a rover saw a coke can laying on the surface of mars it would just be another rock. A human will immediately understand the great implications of it.