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

The problem isn't the population. Bedrock can handle more than that. London isn't sinking because of all the people (and London is huge!), it's sinking because the ice sheet that pressed the Highlands deep into the crust has been gone for the last 10,000 years, resulting in the entire island tilting back to where it naturally should be. You could move London's population into the Great Glen and it would not make the slightest difference - London would still be sinking. The ice sheets were a whole lot heavier than a few tens of millions of people.

(Ok, it would make a difference. If the rich people actually lived in Scotland, the transit system and public services would see a thousand percent improvement inside a week. If they were also forced to speak Gaelic, English would vanish in a month.)

Aquifers can be deep. The aquifer that supplies the town of Buxton in England is so deep that it takes rainfall 5,000 years to rech it.

Every place? Fascinating.

There are towns in England and Wales that have been occupied for the past 10,000 years. Manchester isn't the greatest place on Earth, but I'm really not convinced it's going to start sinking into the ground any time in the next thousand years. If "short term" is longer than the remaining lifespan of the human race, I am not convinced "short" is really the right word.

"Short term" is only meaningful if it's shorter than the time needed to take meaningful remedial action, and the time it would take to remediate the problem in Mexico City vastly exceeds the time it will take for the city to crumble into oblivion.

The sun will not explode in 4 billion years. It's far too small. It might well run out of hydrogen by then, but that will simply cause it to swell. If, in four billion years, we can't find a way to drift the Earth outwards to remain within the goldilocks zone, then we're a failure as a species. Of course, we might well have built a Dyson Ring by then. Although, to be honest, if we were going to do that, we'd want to find a gas cloud that was about to form a stellar nursary and head there. If we arrive as the proto star fires up, we've maximum resources in the easiest possible form (a dust cloud, so no mining needed and minimal processing required), can build the Dyson Ring or Dyson Sphere by the time the star really gets going, and have another ten to fifteen billion years.

Yup 100%. I can pass among neurotypicals if I keep my mouth shut, but people quickly pick up on it if interacting with me.

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.

Is there room for consciousness to manifest in a brain?

As a matter of fact, yes. Specifically, to the Greenland region.

Although a golden bridge of grossly outsized proportions and festooned with tacky ornamentation would be much preferred.

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.

Musk has done good things. I really appreciate the way the Tesla pushed electric car development, and SpaceX has done good things. But those aren't recent...and even back then I wouldn't have wanted to work for him or live under his control.

However that's not what this case is about. But I hope they both lose.

If you really want safety you don't train your AI on the internet. Internet chat is where people say what they feel like without worrying about repercussions. That's not a good source of training data...except for learning not to trust what people say.

Of the two, I distrust Altman less than I distrust Musk. OTOH, I *think* Musk has become less competent than Altman. Not that that's really relevant to the case. The ideal result would be Musk being put in jail for contempt of court...and held there until he managed to make an honest statement of the case. And for OpenAI to be turned into a non-profit.

It was NEVER a piece of open software. The name itself was a lie. And that tells you all you need to know about those controlling it.

Also, the larger companies are more likely to update their own equipment. (Yeah, not always. Sigh.) But I was more thinking of small devices, often embedded, that aren't usually updated.