How accurately you predict how someone will respond to a particular situation or a prompt?
A joke is one of the best ways to assess whether a person ‘did’ what you wanted them to do inside their head – and most often resulting in laughter.
You don’t need to know the breakdown of the internal processes of mind needed for the joke to work, but if you are looking to influence in a more subtle fashion it will certainly help.
Take the example of an ‘Escher Handy’ for instance. Soon after delivering the message to Richard Herring, I told it to an old colleague – Tom Owen.
Instantly he ‘got it’, and made a hand gesture of ‘two hands’ in a loop.
This mapping of his internal experience (i.e. what he was thinking) with the external verification (i.e. the gesture) was perfect.
But what if he hadn’t made that signal that he understood it?
Well, then we have to rely on some other mechanism e.g. a description of the thing he experienced in mind.
Until we have telepathic machines that can verify the experience, this is exactly what we will have to do.
