By launching the crew on Orion and rendezvousing with Starship in earth or lunar orbit one can sidestep the problem for now. But someone might be tasked with looking at ejector seats and things like the old M.O.O.S.E.* bail-out from orbit ideas.
* General Electric's Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment. See, for example, Teitel, Discover magazine, 12 Oct. 2017 or the wikipedia article on MOOSE.
People typically can give brief, simple, explanations (reasons) for their beliefs and actions. These may, in fact, be an approximation to what is really a network of subconscious motivations.
Sometimes A.s.a. H. takes an action or makes a decision that I don't expect/understand. When that occurs I usually try to explore the hierarchical patterns of activation that lead to this action/decision. I have found that frequently a number of weak activations may have "summed up" to produce the unexpected outcome. (Like when a large number of small weights in a neural network act together to produce some output signal.)
In my 28 January 2013 blog I pointed out that Siri did not have all of the functionality that I would want a machine intelligence to have.* Most importantly, it had no value system.** I would level the same criticisms of ChatGPT, GPT-3, and the like. Not to say that I don't find them interesting and useful.
* See, for example, my blog of 29 September 2010.
** I have argued that how intelligent a creature can be depends upon how good a value system it has. See for example my, Science Is Not Value Free, Trans. Kansas Acad. Sci., vol. 119, no. 2, pg. 249, 2016. One such value system is shown in my blog of 21 September 2010.
Various research groups* have used toys as robotics hardware platforms in order to cut costs. I bought a "Tiger Twister stunt vehicle" (Speed Well International Industrial Ltd.) because it is supposed to be able to climb stairs and is large enough to carry a Raspberry Pi single board computer. I find that the Tiger Twister does (for the first time) give me a limited stair climbing capability** provided that the stairs are not too slippery.
* For example: Hogg, Martin, and Resnick, Braitenberg Creatures, MIT Media Lab, E&L Memo report #13, June 1991. Connell, Creature Design with the Subsumption Architecture, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pg 1124, August 1987. Dawson, Dupuis, and Wilson, From Bricks to Brains, UBCPress, May 2010. my blog of 8 Jan. 2018.
** There are LEGO robot designs that also have limited stair climbing capability.
Occasionally an input vector* will fall into two different categories/classes. These categories may trigger different responses/outputs. This is relevant to the idea/experience of "free will."**
* This can be the "input" to any level in the A.s.a. H. hierarchy. It need not be the input on the bottom most layer, i.e. the sensory input from the environment.
** See, for example, my blogs of 8 July 2011 and 21 Jan. 2015.
Some of the cases in A.s.a. H.'s case based hierarchical memory include actions (occurring at one time step or another). During the course of operation when such a case becomes activated any such future ("planned") action becomes one of A.s.a. H.'s intentions.
In his new book* Michael Wolf asks: "If natural languages deeply influence the forms that our thinking takes, could they be so different that we 'live' in substantially 'different worlds'?" My blog of 15 June 2022 lists some of the alternate realities that exist. But I don't think that language is as important a factor in this as Wolf does.
* Michael Wolf, Philosophy of Languages, Routledge, 2023, page 28
