[M_Grey]

Optical illusions are neat, but I don't think it rises to the level of a "hack" in the sense that anyone is talking about here. Subliminal stimuli is, as the massive warnings on the article suggest, utterly unproven. There is a difference between being swayed or marketed to, or just too lazy to disengage from the onslaught of marketing... and "hacking". If hacking humans worked, the marketing wouldn't be necessary in the first place.

[hexagonc]

Although some of my analogies were a stretch, I think it might be valuable to regard these types of manipulation as hacking. If nothing else, to make us aware of our own susceptibilty to con artists, fake news and government influence. The reason these techniques are effective are very similar to the reasons hacking methods of computers are effective; they take advantage of systems that evolved or were built for one purpose in order to use them for another, often to the detriment of the victim.

For example, the existence of optical illusions and stage magic are a necessary consequence of particular limitations of our visual system and attention. One could predict the existence of new, never before seen optical illusions purely from knowledge of the way the brain processes visual stimuli. For more information on this, see the works of Roger Shepard[1][2] who did a lot of research into the psychology of perception and mental representations.

This has ramifications for not just human psychology but artificial intelligence. If we want to build a computer system or robot that can process visual information quickly like humans and animals do, then we may very well have to program them with the same simplifying assumptions that humans and animals use to make rapid visual processing tractable[3][4]. A consequence of this may be that these computer systems will be subject to the same optical illusions as humans as a necessary consequence of limited attention and computational resources. Furthermore, the misperceptions that make stage magic possible may be possible to induce in any system that can only pay attention to a subset of the visual stimuli given and that must make assumptions about the intentions of the subject being viewed. These assumptions and inferences are usually accurate under ordinary circumstances when the subject is not trying to deceive the observer, but a clever subject could engineer circumstances where the observer has no choice but to be either deceived or accept that their perceptions have no logical explanation -- hence the woman appears to be sawed in half even though we know this is unlikely; there is no visual information to disprove that she was (the lack of blood is evidence that she wasn't sawed in half but this is only evidence from our past experience with people being cut by blades).

We are susceptible to influence by fake news and celebrity product endorsement due to our evolved preference for information coming from "authority figures" and sources that agree with our existing views[5]. Now, normally one may hesitate to call exploiting these systems "hacking" because the exploiter often doesn't know that that is what they are doing just as someone may stumble upon a new computer exploit without knowing exactly why it works.

Again, I would argue that it may be to our advantage to think of the targeted exploitation of these innate tendencies as a type of "hacking" if only to make it more likely that we can avoid being influenced to beliefs and behaviors that may not be in our long term best interest.

[1] - http://im-possible.info/english/art/classic/shepard.html

[2] - http://rumelhartprize.org/?page_id=110

[3] - http://ilab.usc.edu/publications/doc/Miau_etal01spie.pdf

[4] - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370202...

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authority_bias - see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases