I don’t know why you are mentioning Starship when I made no mention of that. Starship HLS is also a dumb idea, but that’s beside the point.

SLS is horribly expensive for what it provides.

The Defense Production Act could be used to meet these ends. SpaceX is a defense contractor and exists at the privilege of the US Government for the US Government.

Coming from several people who work with SpaceX, there is a dedicated group of people that exist to distract Elon from all vital SpaceX functions.

SLS is on track to be more expensive when adjusted for inflation per moon mission than the Apollo program. It is wildly too expensive, and should be cancelled.

This coupled with the fact that the rocket is incapable of sending a manned capsule to low earth orbit which is the the lunar gateway is planned to a Rectilinear Halo Orbit instead.

Those working in the space industry know that SpaceX’s success is not because of Elon but instead Gwynne Shotwell. She is the President and CEO of SpaceX and responsible for all things SpaceX. The best outcome after the election is to remove Elon from the board and revoke his ownership of what is effectively a defense company for political interference in this election. Employees at SpaceX would be happy, the government would be happy, and the American people would be happy.

The technical definition of AI in academic settings is any system that can perform a task with relatively decent performance and do so on its own.

The field of AI is absolutely massive and includes super basic algorithms like Dijsktra’s Algorithm for finding the shortest path in a graph or network, even though a 100% optimal solution is NP-Complete, and does not yet have a solution that is solveable in polynomial time. Instead, AI algorithms use programmed heuristics to approximate optimal solutions, but it’s entirely possible that the path generated is in fact not optimal, which is why your GPS doesn’t always give you the guaranteed shortest path.

To help distinguish fields of research, we use extra qualifiers to narrow focus such as “classical AI” and “symbolic AI”. Even “Machine Learning” is too ambiguous, as it was originally a statistical process to finds trends in data or “statistical AI”. Ever used excel to find a line of best fit for a graph? That’s “machine learning”.

Albeit, “statistical AI” does accurately encompass all the AI systems people commonly think about like “neural AI” and “generative AI”. But without getting into more specific qualifiers, “Deep Learning” and “Transformers” are probably the best way to narrow down what most people think of when they here AI today.

Valve is a unique company with no traditional hierarchy. In business school, I read a very interesting Harvard Business Review article on the subject. Unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall, but this is Google AI’s summary of the article which I confirm to be true from what I remember:

According to a Harvard Business Review article from 2013, Valve, the gaming company that created Half Life and Portal, has a unique organizational structure that includes a flat management system called “Flatland”. This structure eliminates traditional hierarchies and bosses, allowing employees to choose their own projects and have autonomy. Other features of Valve’s structure include:

• Self-allocated time: Employees have complete control over how they allocate their time
• No managers: There is no managerial oversight
• Fluid structure: Desks have wheels so employees can easily move between teams, or “cabals”
• Peer-based performance reviews: Employees evaluate each other’s performance and stack rank them
• Hiring: Valve has a unique hiring process that supports recruiting people with a variety of skills

I am a pilot and this is NOT how autopilot works.

There is some autoland capabilities in the larger commercial airliners, but autopilot can be as simple as a wing-leveler.

The waypoints must be programmed by the pilot in the GPS. Altitude is entirely controlled by the pilot, not the plane, except when on a programming instrument approach, and only when it captures the glideslope (so you need to be in the correct general area in 3d space for it to work).

An autopilot is actually a major hazard to the untrained pilot and has killed many, many untrained pilots as a result.

Whereas when I get in my Tesla, I use voice commands to say where I want to go and now-a-days, I don’t have to make interventions. Even when it was first released 6 years ago, it still did more than most aircraft autopilots.