Human perception and intelligence are by no means infallible, but neither are they anywhere near being as brittle as current AI. The thing about illusions is that we generally know that we are being subject to an illusion, and we also usually have the depth of understanding to know when we don't understand something about what we are seeing or think we have heard, and we have the depth of understanding to think of actions we can take to resolve the issue.
As for cognitive biases, has any AI even come close enough to be comparable on that issue? For that matter, has any AI come close to understanding the concept of an optical illusion?
I am also encouraged by recent progress, but there is nothing to be gained in playing down the distance to go.
> The thing about illusions is that we generally know that we are being subject to an illusion.
Citation needed? I did my undergrad in cognitive science, and while my knowledge of illusions is very limited, I never came across anything to suggest that we have an innate awareness of when our perceptual system is being tricked.
Frankly, when I first saw your post, I thought I was being trolled, especially as the phrase 'citation needed' is over-used, frequently in an attempt to avoid the burden of proof. For a citation, there's hyperbovine's reply. On reflection, however, I think your post raises a reasonable question.
Firstly, whether it is innate, learned or some combination, all are equally valid here.
In general, we cannot know if we are being deceived by our senses, and if you follow this line of argument to its end, you reach solipsism. With regard to the illusions of the sort presented in the linked article, they seem to fall into three types. There are the ones where we are immediately aware of being subject to an illusion; this is especially true in the cases where there is apparent motion. There are some where we do not notice unless we investigate further or have our attention brought to it, such as those involving apparent differences in brightness or color. Then there are those that actually depend on us noticing that there is an illusion - Necker cubes, for example.
In real life, when faced with an ambiguous input from our senses, we are often aware the fact because of the dissonance with our general understanding of the world, and we are usually able to take actions specifically designed to resolve the ambiguity. In contrast, AI can be very confident about the most ridiculous conclusions.
So we don't infallibly know when we are being tricked, but even in the cases where we are, further investigation often reveals that what is going on. In contrast, has any AI ever demonstrated any understanding of the concept of an illusion? The fact that we can sometimes be tricked by illusions for a while does not imply that AI has reached parity with humans in this regard, or that the fragility of image recognition is not an issue.
Wait, isn't that completely obvious? As a kid I used to seek them out precisely for the thrill of feeling my brain being tricked. Nobody needs to be told why MC Escher drawings are fun to look at.
>we generally know that we are being subject to an illusion,
Is this an inherent power or a result of those methodological and institutional systems that reduce our cognitive brittleness? The fata morgana is an illusion, but even today people see it and think it's a ghost ship, something that logically is completely and literally impossible. I'm not suggesting AI is on equal footing with humanity yet, but I think the comparison of these limitations is valid.
Many illusions - especially those involving color or apparent motion - are consequences of relatively low-level signal processing. Putting those aside, what you call 'methodological and institutional systems' I think of as 'understanding'. It feels to me that how I make sense of my senses is, after the signal processing, loosely based on something like forming hypotheses about what is going on in the context of how we understand the world, and evaluating their consistency and credibility. I accept the possibility that all of this is nothing more than very sophisticated statistical pattern-matching, but that has yet to be demonstrated.
As for cognitive biases, has any AI even come close enough to be comparable on that issue? For that matter, has any AI come close to understanding the concept of an optical illusion?
I am also encouraged by recent progress, but there is nothing to be gained in playing down the distance to go.