I'm John Natch with Professor John Cochran of Stanford University and a fellow at the

Hoover Institution writing at the Digitalist Papers asking is AI a threat to democracy, promoting

democracy. We probably should define democracy but we haven't got time enough for

all the examples. It can be synonymous with transparency. Can be, not always.

However, we now come to what is to be done. The regulators, the threat, the apocalyptic language. I give an example. the Elon Musk, a very outspoken partisan, has a company SpaceX that's waiting to test its

Starship super-heavy again from its Boca Chica launch site.

This time it wants to do something spectacular. On the way down it

wants to catch the super heavy, the first stage booster, with what it's called the

chopsticks, never been done before, not let it settle on the land but catch it as if you had a pair of scissors and grasping like a medical procedure and grasping the rocket and holding it in place.

However, the FAA has delayed, delayed, and delayed approval of this launch and recently testimony by the leader of the FDA, FAA, not FDA,

Federal Aeronautics Administration, said that they were going to take more time to assess now that

they've learned that on the way down the booster will break the sound barrier.

In other it would be very simple to solve this. The Starship people are being contained and

all of us are being held back from going to Mars, which is not a safe ambition,

but there it is.

By a single regulator who clearly has poor facts, can't you just reach in and correct him

rather than worrying about the technology of Starship.

Isn't that a simple version of the world?

Well, this is an interesting case because what in the world is actually going on.

I don't know the particulars of why the FAA is doing this, but there is a pattern that

Musk is being hounded by regulatory agencies around the spectrum for all sorts of things and it's not coincidental

that he is a public supporter of President Trump who also owns a Twitter site that a lot of the a lot of those in power don't

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