Keep Kind Intentions

We’ve all heard the phrase “She wears rose colored glasses” - meaning that a person sees things in a positive, rosy light. “Most people see what they want to see” is another phrase that’s often used, and is somewhat analogous to “seeing the world with rose colored glasses”, but points to more of a bias in our seeing. “You’ll know it when you see it” is another phrase and implies a discernment and understanding behind our eyes.

All these phrases point to the very complicated nature of human sight, especially when it’s directly in conversation with our “minds eye”.

We’ve also seen new tech enabled glasses that layer additional fields of information into our field of vision. This type of augmented reality, or augmented vision, is going to gain enormous traction in the coming years. In theory, someone with a particularly active mind or who is trained as a memory student can achieve the same effect, layering floating phrases over each object they see, and tagging them with meaning. All these examples point to an important nature of our sight, namely - our eyes are more than just passive security cameras scanning the environment providing grainy footage back to the mind for future reference.

Consider a dutiful security camera at an art museum, filming 24/7 - it “sees” the artwork all day long, but it is not really seeing the art in any meaningful fashion. Meaningful seeing - what we sometimes call “vision” is closer to the point, but not altogether helpful. Even among art students at the art museum sitting on the benches, a beginning student will literally not see the same things that a more experienced artist will see, even though they are both sitting there staring at the same exact painting. So the eye can be trained - in a mechanistic sense, to see particular small details that an untrained eye will not catch or observe. But of course having this kind of “artistic vision” in an art critic or art instructor kind of sense does not necessarily mean that person will actually have “creative artistic vision”.

All of which finally leads us to kindness. Kindness is one those things that falls under the “You’ll know it when you see it” category. Usually kindness is a mosaic of simple small deeds that no one really notices or thinks much about. In the future, walking house robots will hopefully be trained to perform these myriad of kind actions around the house. (Like our security camera - it may or may not see that is being “kind” - but that line of thought is for another day.) But ask yourself - if you were in charge of programming your house robot to be “kind’ - what exactly would you tell it?

1). Attentive: On a practical and basic level, a robot, (or person) wearing Kind Colored Glasses would be attentive to the people around them. If someone gets in some kind of problem, or falls on the floor, Kind Robot had better know to go and help.

2). Thoughtful: Somewhere on a continuum between a white glove waiter and Jeeve the house butler, Kind Robot should understand what pleases the various people around them.

3). Empathateic: Kind Robot Glasses could make our robot attentive and thoughtful, but still not be very kind. The final layer of kindness involves some level of empathetic mirroring and genuine compassion. This is difficult to quantify, but humans generally can tell when this level of emotion is being shared. Whether robots will get there is a different story.

So - in conclusion, we do see what we want to see, and there are many different ways of seeing. Putting on Kind Colored Glasses is one way of seeing that will color your world in exciting and surprising ways. Try them out for a day or two and see what happens!