Counterargument: think how many of those people could be put out of their misery if the cost of water was increased to $1k/gallon and all other sources of water were removed.
I think that the question of what "understanding" is will become important soon, if not already. Most people don't really understand as much as you might think we do, an apple for example has properties like flavor, texture, appearance, weight and firmness it also is related to other things like trees and is in categories like food or fruit. A model can store the relationship of apple to other things and the properties of apples, the model could probably be given "personal preferences" like a preferred flavor profile and texture profile and use this to estimate if apples would be preferred by the preferences and give reasonings for it.
Unique thought is hard to define and there is probably a way to have a computer do something similar enough to be indistinguishable, probably not through simple LLMs. Maybe using a LLM as a way to convert internal "ideas" to external words and external words to internal "ideas" to be processed logically probably using massive amounts of reference materials, simulation, computer algebra, music theory, internal hypervisors or some combination of other models.
I understand it when it is specifically for large cities (>500,000 people or so) but when done at a state level it makes no sense. I understand that it is functionality not enforced in smaller communities, but I personally think any law that has poor enforcement for good reason (such as more than half of the vehicles not complying) should be removed or redefined (perhaps only require it on commercial vehicles or make it a secondary crime).
Conforms to a specific revision of HTML with a specific revision of JavaScript and css, also requiring it to not use any proprietary extensions of either HTML or JavaScript.
Or the government could just use PDFs and email, I think that might be able to accomplish all the functionality of most websites.
An internal Ethernet connection to a replaceable cellular modem would be a solution to this as you could use whatever carrier you want to, or just replace the cellular modem with any other source of internet connectivity you choose.
diagonals