We need to distract the public from the Soviet bomb sniffing balloons we're flying... er, embarassing sex files we're hiding! What should we do?

UFO stories?

How did you manage to spell UAP wrong when writing it out correctly immediately after?

What letter in UFO do you think stands for "aliens?"

Yeah, but you also send some of it. That's negative data (the opposite of receiving) so it cancels out.

P2P to distribute updates, which can dramatically reduce the amount of data sent over the wire.

Google's wire, sure. Your wire, no.

You are (nominally) a democracy. The voters are responsible. That's what it means.

Voting is important. Maybe stop treating it like a football game. You bet, a first good step would be getting rid of the paid sponsorships in the stadium.

Damn, that's half of all the sick leave taken in just a quarter of the week!

They pile rocks on top.

Hey, can you imagine how much better the plumbing in your house would be if the pipes were a bunch of 1 inch sections connected by joints?

I don't know why you'd think the short sections would have to be aligned less precisely. A 1 mm error multiplied by a a couple thousand joints between 10 m sections has a good chance of being a lot bigger than a 1 mm error multiplied by 80 joints.

I used to think that maybe I, a simple country ignoramus, just wasn't equipped to understand the Wonders of the Modern Age.

Nonsense. The key is to keep that humility and read a book or use the informative parts of the Internet.

It's already been spent... on you.

The people of the United States, represented by their duly elected representatives, illegally collected this money, and then spent it. Mostly on the military, to judge by the latest funding requests. So yeah, the perpetrators of the crime have to pay the restitution. It doesn't matter that you hired someone else to do the crime on your behalf.

That's ridiculous. Tariffs come with records (copious amounts) on both sides. The government knows exactly who paid them, and those people have a nice receipt from the relevant authority.

There might be some squabbling over exactly which payments fall under the specific tariff regimes that were ruled illegal, and getting your current government to actually follow the law is dicey, but there's nothing that needs to be investigated.

Family-owned businesses traditionally don't prioritize "extracting maximum value".

Lol.

You might have also heard the names like Carnegie, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. They weren't called "robber barons" for nothing.

I am not joking. Quantum mechanics is called that. You can look it up.

Your next two paragraphs, sure. There are lots of interpretations of quantum mechanics, and also lots of interpretations of quantum field theory, the relative of quantum mechanics that isn't obviously wrong. They range from strictly deterministic to probabalistic.

That's not relevant to the thread though. The OP said "mechanical." Strictly speaking "mechanics" involves describing the relationships among physical objects, but we can squint our eyes a bit and consider that the OP meant predicting behaviour, but it does not mean strictly deterministic. Quantum mechanics makes very good predictions. Those predictions are probabalistic. Newtonian mechanics also makes pretty good predictions (though nowhere near as good as QM). Those predictions are ALSO probabalistic. Both are "mechanics." The difference, if there is one, comes down to interpretation.

Neither generative models nor the human brain are deterministic. Both are mechanical, unless you happen to have some mystical beliefs about one or both.

We need a better concept.

You've illustrated the problem but I'm not sure the "solution" you're suggesting exists. We have lots of different concepts to describe cognition, consciousness being only one of them. There are more stringent definitions for consciousness too, and that spectrum illustrates the basic problem: real concrete definitions admit too many things that many people would prefer they didn't, and the definitions that rigorously exclude those tend to boil down to "magic that only (some?) humans possess".

Turing didn't propose a quacks-like-a-duck test because he was an idiot.

Cats, and many other animals, are generally regarded as being conscious, yes.

It's a deterministic process that we can fully reproduce by doing calculations on a piece of paper.

It's not. Generative models use random noise as a significant input. They are not determinstic.

They are stochastic, which means you can, at least theoretically, calculate the probability distribution of their output given their input. The same thing can be said about you though.