A bit peripheral but I went goggle-eyed when I saw people suggest that we won't be telling stories featuring digital sentience anymore now that we know what the real thing is like. Total ignorance of the history of science fiction!
The fifth Gaunt's Ghosts book went in the opposite direction for once, giving a truly astronomical figure for the weight of bombs dropped by a Marauder formation in a single night
Proving to you that an llm is actually a sentient being would require also proving that an LLM is NOT an unthinking object, and thus requires proving a negative.
Proving any statement requires that you also disprove its negative inverse. So actually, "you can't prove a negative" is a practical rule of thumb, not a real ironclad principle of logic.
It's the only way to avoid the terrible implications of "the British and French veterans were appropriately horrified by their experience, but the veterans of Italy and Germany somehow became fascists who relished violence for some reason"
Drones were used quite a bit by the USAF in Vietnam. 80s MilSF was in turn a bit more technologically advanced than some might think, though I can't speak for Cherryh specifically.
