Your post was quite reasonable, and probably true, until you wrote "AIs aren't capable of reasoning". There *are* definitions of reasoning for which that it true, but they aren't the ones in common use. Cicero would use that kind of definition in his "school of rhetoric", where he taught people how to win arguments". Socrates would not. He was trying to find truth.

Clearly AIs have limited reason. They can (at least in principle) do perfect logic, but the difference between that an reason is not well defined. (And logic can prove that you can't prove algebra to be self-consistent.) To me reason is evaluating a set of data and a goal, and using logic to plot a nearly-optimal path to achieve the goal. I think where AIs are generally most deficient is in their goals, though obviously they also have an imperfect understanding of the current state. (Well, so do people.)

That said, there are many areas where current AIs seem deficient when compared with people. This doesn't mean or imply that they don't have a modest amount of the features that they are deficient in, but merely that we expect them to have more. Think of capabilities as being gradients rather than boolean variables. This is commonly called "jagged capabilities". They're better at some things than most people are, and worse at other things than most people are.

How do you know?
I will grant that there are definitions of "feelings" that would make your statement true by definition, but I will guarantee that most people don't use those definitions.

If you want to claim "it's synthetic, therefore it can't be a feeling", you've deprived your mind of a tool for thinking in this space. Submarines don't swim, but airplanes fly. Perhaps it's not useful to think of submarines as swimming, and perhaps it's useful to think of airplanes as flying. And perhaps it's useful to think of LLMs as having feelings. (Also perhaps it isn't, but just asserting that isn't useful, you need to demonstate it. My wife found it useful to attribute feelings to her car. The model didn't work for me, but it worked for her.)

A quick search didn't provide an answer, but the indications were that the cosmic voids are much of the universe. The search of turned up things like https://link.springer.com/arti... , but didn't actually reveal the proportion of the volume of the universe that is contained within cosmic voids, but did *indicate* that it sure wasn't trivial.

Well, I'm no expert in the field, but that's what I've read.

That the universe is not uniform at the large scale is blatantly obvious. Just consider the cosmic voids. And that implies that "time" should be running faster within those voids (because general relativity).

This isn't generally dealt with by global theories because it's computationally intractable...but it's inherent in relativity. So unless you want to break relativity, areas with low mass have time running slower than areas with high mass. And the cosmic voids are HUGE.

OTOH, This is a different argument as to why the universe isn't globally uniform at the large scale. But it reaches the same conclusion (to that question).

If you don't want AI, why would you but a GoogleBook?

That's not a flimsy excuse, it's a plausible one. But considering "Blackstone owned" I'm not sure that I believe it.

Also, even if it's true it's "more than they agreed to".

You might ask Firefox. They've reported a few. I think most companies aren't reporting them...which is what should be expected.

Of those, Google will be the hardest to replace. At least without exerting eminent domain over patents.

What's sad is that it has taken so long to reach that decision. I thought it was clear they needed to do this back before 2000. (I'm not exactly sure how long, but plausibly while I was in high school.)

It's still illegal. Enforcement, however, has always been a problem.

There's a reasonably good correlation between bigfoot sightings and bears being present. So don't just dismiss it as hallucinations, but consider misidentification.

Tell that to McDonalds.

You are wrong. Several reporters and columnists have been important voices in the past. But quite possibly not this decade.

You're too cynical. Plenty of Slashdot readers are fans of Musk, and Slashdot it small enough these days that I doubt Musk would bother.