"Never this way and never beyond our capacities for rational thought" makes it so nothing can be stated about the "understanding" any neural network has about any data short of an AGI. Which is obviously not too useful because an incomplete model of something is not the same as not having the model at all. Eg. if the model is generating too many arms, that still means it has extracted some model of what an arm looks like, even if it hasn't fully internalized the fact that humans have up to 2 arms (although depending on the training set this also gets messy as it isn't uncommon for religious imagery of various religions to depict humanoid figures with several arms, where the difference is related to context not available to the AI).
Humans can be tricked very easily by optical illusions and it isn't uncommon for some illusions to be intentionally built to 'harm' people (eg patterns on the floor which make you lose your sense of balance). Even with rational thought such things can be difficult to deal with. We're probably just as vulnerable to adversarial attacks, the issue being that unlike artificial neural networks we don't have an easy feedback loop to run millions of times in guiding a similar adversarial search.
The main difference to optical illusions is that we are aware of them and integrate this knowledge into our model of the world, so that we can deal with them to a certain extend.
Con artists isn't a big problem, if it worked on everyone then you would have con artists become the richest persons in the world. Like, just con Elon Musk out of his billions, why hasn't anyone done that yet if it is so easy to trick humans?
> Like, just con Elon Musk out of his billions, why hasn't anyone done that yet if it is so easy to trick humans?
Like getting him to spend $44 billion for Twitter?
(An ex of mine is convinced that Musk is a con artist, but she's also a literal card carrying anarcho-communist; I'm not that cynical about Musk).
Even at a lower level, I had my bank[0] call up and tell me there was too much money in my account and they'd really recommend a wealth management consultation to avoid me being scammed, and that wasn't even £100k.
That said, I was thinking mainly of street cons — shell games, possibly even shoplifting and pickpocketing — as the previous discussion was about optical illusions. Business level scams are about a broader category of cognitive bias, and I'd say almost all gambling is that type of thing, likewise bitcoin, dulce et decorum est, and populist politics.
[0] or at least they said they were, but I said no before getting to the point where asking for proof the call wasn't itself a scam would've been useful
Humans can be tricked very easily by optical illusions and it isn't uncommon for some illusions to be intentionally built to 'harm' people (eg patterns on the floor which make you lose your sense of balance). Even with rational thought such things can be difficult to deal with. We're probably just as vulnerable to adversarial attacks, the issue being that unlike artificial neural networks we don't have an easy feedback loop to run millions of times in guiding a similar adversarial search.