"Still designed by humans." No they are not. They are learned via backpropagation. This is the entire reason why neural networks work so well and why we have no idea how they work when they get big.
And who designed backpropagation? It is not a magical property of artificial neurons or some law of nature or god's miracle. A bunch of mathematicians banged their head on the problem of backpropagation, tossed it to a computer, and voilà , neural networks made sense.
Neural networks work so well because someone chooses the right loss function for the right problem. Wrong loss function -> wrong results. It's not magic. Nor it's biology.
