Kaleidoscoping: How to Use AI's Greatest Strength to Connect Learning With Humanity

And Human's Razor: Taking the shortest path through AI to human-made artifacts

AI’s greatest strength is connecting ideas.

I like the phrase Eat the fish, spit the bones. Take what you like, leave the rest. Many seem to be taking sides on whether AI is all fish or all bones. I’m here to advocate for a middle path with humanity at its center.

Many of us want to think. We want to write because we see it as a tool for shaping our own minds. We care about the simple pleasure of learning for its own sake. We do it unprompted in our free time. It’s a part of how we operate. We enjoy wading through felt ideas.

Since we see the value in the actions themselves and not just the outcomes, many of us don’t want to outsource our thinking and writing to robots. We don’t want AI to summarize entire books for us, to parrot feelingless versions of thoughts like a soulless puppet, or to reduce entire schools of thought to bullet points.

We want to wander—to saunter intellectual vistas ourselves.

AI doesn’t have to replace that. It can help us do it better.

Using Human’s Razor and Kaleidoscoping

To maximize the good and minimize the bad from LLMs for lifelong learners, I propose a simple razor that I call Human’s Razor.

Human’s Razor: Take the shortest path through AI to a human-made artifact.

The Human’s Razor pushes us to leverage what AI is best at—making connections between ideas—and limits the downsides. By taking the shortest path, we get right back to connecting with other humans, with their ideas, and with the artifacts they produce.

Essentially, kaleidoscoping is just a loop of applying human’s razor over and over. You bounce from poem to film to painting to song to inspiring person.

It’s an intuition-led way to explore deeper, less-traditional, and more satisfying connections between ideas.

Kaleidoscoping: Using an LLM to connect ideas, books, articles, poems, paintings, films—any human-crafted product of the mind—to other human-made artifacts based on shared themes, feelings, aesthetic emotions, values, direct or indirect inspiration, or any other type of relationship.

Now that we’ve explained the terminology, let’s run through how you can leverage kaleidoscoping for fun, self-directed learning.

I’ll give some examples of prompts that leverage Human’s Razor:

What are 5 poems in the public domain and 5 books of poetry from living poets that deal with the same aesthetic emotions as A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman?

Name 5 living authors who stated that their writing was inspired by Tolstoy.

I loved the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Help me pick out the themes, the emotions, the values, and the underlying philosophies. For each emotion, value, and underlying philosophy identified, point me to a few poems, paintings, books, and other films that explore those same themes.

All we’re doing is asking for the conceptual connection.

Then, it’s our responsibility to go deeper and actually engage with that artifact to create a personal connection. Buy the book. Read the poem. Look at the painting.

Pay attention to what resonates while you’re looking, and record it.

Each human-made artifact that the AI points to is like an anchor point when rock-climbing. If we climb too far without anchoring, we risk bad outcomes.

When we choose to engage with human-made content, we can feel the difference. AI output is the processed food of information diets.

Kaleidoscopers in the Wild

Phil Tippett is one of the greatest stop-motion animators in the world. He shaped the visual language for iconic films like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and RoboCop.

He has a fascinating system of using an analog version of kaleidoscoping in his creative process.

Over time, he’s filled a room with trinkets.

The trinkets are not random—they’re items with which he felt some sort of connection.

He photographs these items, puts the photos in a random order inside of a photo album, and flips through them when he’s experiencing creative block.

By flashing images of artifacts he felt connected to, his mind makes connections and he finds inspiration.

That’s the whole goal of kaleidoscoping: assembling an arsenal of diverse ideas, concepts, and all kinds of artifacts made by other humans that we feel strongly connected to.

If we catalog what we find while doing this intuition-led learning, it’s a gift for our future selves.

I have a personal system that I use to capture these kinds of ideas. It’s essentially a modified version of Zettelkasten. I use what I call an Idea Spine to relate ideas together based on feelings, types of intelligence, vibes—really anything that can help me connect them and spark new paths of inquiry or creation. I’ll write more about it if people are interested.

Conclusion

We don’t need to convince AI to go away to have more human connections.

With the right perspective, AI can help us do more of what we love.