I relate to this cartoon, it's a large feature of the kinds of questions I get asked all the time and have to answer with more or less degrees of success. Technology (particularly software) is a bit like "magic" to most people, you can't see it, feel it, smell it etc. and yet it controls so much of what we do these days. Consequently many are often unable to place an idea within the bounds of reality, they struggle to put it into any of the usual boxes that decision makers need to put things in, for example, is an idea, impossible, possible but hard or perhaps even easy?
Sometimes things are easy to say but impossible to do, for example "predict the lottery numbers". However, some people I've met actually think this is something that might be "possible but hard" using technologies like "artificial intelligence". Of course such a view betrays a lack of understanding of both the problem space (i.e. probability) but also of what something like AI in it's current forms can and can't actually do. Quite often when someone's bubble is burst by an expert the response is "yeah but you can't prove it isn't", and the answer to that is simply that as a collective our species has invested time and energy in understanding both problem spaces and the possible solution spaces and in this case, they simply don't overlap. Of course, we can never really "know" anything with perfect certainty but we can know things to such a degree of certainty that for practical purposes we may as well deem them as "known", death and taxes for example.
The challenge of the "expert" is particularly acute when the detractor is someone who is charismatic, particularly ignorant, has financial backing and political connections, think, Brexit, Climate-change denial, Anti-vaxxers, creationists et al, sometimes people prefer to judge you based on your accent and haircut rather than investing precious energy in understanding what you're saying, charlatans thrive in such environments.
