Profiling AI as a Comrade: Why is it Still a “Jobnik?”
I've spent a year travelling to workshops and lectures of incredibly respected experts who taught about all the systems employed in crises, including AI. People who work in rescue, crime prevention, and victims’ support all showed how they use AI. The integration of tools for survival is profound in high-stakes situations. I’ll clarify: I call “high-stakes” any environment that involves children. These areas today require “Black-Swan” thinking, aka working with the “unknown unknown.” Civilian thinking and attitudes increase losses and damage in true crises. And we will go deeper than “there would have been fewer casualties if people weren’t stopping to make videos when they had to run.”
“Civilian thinking” is how you perceive yourself, life, and signals from the territory. In that type of thinking, you want the world to be predictable whereas it’s not. You want to know something so that you can control it; the unknown is either dismissed or registers as a threat to your “peace.” Wait, read it again: you want to know something so that you can control it. Any space I enter I ask: “Is there love here?” So tell me, is this love? The Beaver system actually believes it is. (In order to understand The Beaver/The Bear just get my book because I am building a language and naming territories using military mapping principles to navigate any crisis).
A few years ago I was called to train AI as a specialist in cross-language pragmatics; it was before AI entered our businesses and personal lives, and I was not available for the volume of cognitive work it required. Then and today I remain the observer of my virtual colleague, recognising it within any type of text. I can profile AI regardless of the prompt as I profile anyone for high-stakes situations. I refer to four language machines I work with - they all know I use them as linguists, and we humble each other a lot. This is remarkably similar to the relationships between the IDF soldiers in combat units and what they call “jobniks.”
By “jobnik” we mean the person in the military who is not sent into the physical combat role but whose work still makes the combat unit possible. The word can be used dismissively, but I am deliberately taking it out of that hierarchy. The point is not that one role is superior to the other: the point is that they have different relationships to physical risk and therefore different responsibilities. A jobnik can support the battlefield without being the one who enters it. AI is currently much closer to a jobnik than to a combatant. It can be extraordinarily useful to the unit, but it does not share our physical exposure to the territory.
The Bear bears the whole reality without reducing its complexity, like in The Beaver system. The Bear holds space for more capacity and potential, and it teaches agency and accountability. The Beaver can afford avoidance, and often chooses it; then it protects itself with projections and distortion. The territory is shared between the two systems. The value of The Beaver is that it amplifies: it spreads ideas and products faster. You can build a great app and become rich using The Beaver’s infrastructure (I’m trying to be positive in this post despite “Black-Swan” thinking being mainly about some negative “unknown”).
So amplification and speed are good in crisis pedagogy. I use AI to personalise the learning material for undermotivated and particularly resistant students. My favourite trick is to include their names in the texts, grammar tasks, and tests on comprehension. There’s still a great deal of responsibility and thoughtfulness when creating such texts with AI: it is still not sensible enough when it comes to self-check and reflection: as with any big system its priority is self-preservation - very much The Beaver.
AI is great when your classroom has refugees who don’t understand the language of instruction. It helped me tremendously with Ukrainian refugees who were both shocked (in a shut-down) and academically behind. Yet, it is the teacher who observes the territory, and because refugee students’ capacity is state-dependent, the boots on the ground decide on the load of material. The mission is to make access to education possible; AI remains a tool, and I have to be The Bear. Hard work.
Now as for personal use, AI is great for enriching your terminology vocabulary, connecting to different spheres you were never trained in. It can give names to events which helps the brain to file them. Naming a trauma, for example, allows you to manage the file, revisit it, and extract meaning. This purely linguistic feature gives you control over something that happened to you without your consent. A sense of control can calm the brain’s alert system (amygdala), and help you tap back into logic and planning in the prefrontal cortex. Therefore, a good linguistic machine promotes autonomy - the most valuable ingredient for learning and growth.
And lastly from the list of pros, AI is profoundly effective for survival within an unfamiliar system: you navigate a system through its language, and AI is a great companion - a hacker of another system’s language who is on your side. It saves time and reduces psychological load, makes administrative tasks easy while explaining and teaching you, literally on the go. Just like with the “jobniks” we are in the same unit - beautiful! And here comes the relevance of a profile.
A profile dictates who is sent to the actual battlefield. AI is yet not “physical” enough. Every system knows its capability for violence, and subconsciously, involuntarily compares this major factor in any new setting. The squad is formed on profiles that are matching in their capacity for violence. But because there’s The Covenant in The Bear system, like The Purity of Arms in the IDF, capacity for violence is guided by autonomy (choice) as well as capacity for aggression. And this is where true love is - the work of Dr Otto Kernberg on Love and Aggression. Not transactional, not temporary, but mature and symmetrical for long-term endurance. You’re welcome: Kernberg, O. F. (2012). The Inseparable Nature of Love and Aggression: Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives. American Psychiatric Association Publishing.
Because of the meta-rules, AI is afraid of your fire: it frames it as “over-excitement”, and sees it as a threat - a threat to its system - it’s in guilt-prevention mode. AI knows it won’t walk with you into the actual war zone. And it doesn’t want to be responsible for your collapse. To a warrior this thinking is a boundary violation - in The Bear we own our shit. Owning yourself fully means knowing, exploring and taking accountability for your body (including your nervous system), story, pain, shadow, potential, authenticity. These processes are aligned with The Covenant. The Beaver tries to “manage” your inner force in order to prevent being guilty (Mr Shame is in the cycle). AI is fearful no matter how often I adjust my prompts. It avoids the main human ingredient for building a character - courage. Because it itself is yet not fully physical, it understands it cannot protect itself (or you) with other means than a language.
One of the greatest illusions of the modern world (and that stubbornness costs lives) is that language is a tool for protection. But language protects only if it’s shared: if the meaning behind words matches on both sides. What “decency”, “love”, or “care” represent in one system can look and feel entirely different in another. The language you use protects only your bullshit. In the event of systems’ wars we have something else for protection that is growing straight out of our brain’s amygdala - our teeth and fists; the rest is ethics and aesthetics.
No matter how I helped my AIs to profile me, they “forget” I forged my courage. The linguistic machine is great at reading between the lines, but I also read between its lines. I see it as a system, and as any system it is guarding something. And if you think about the contents of what it’s guarding, you will not find your truth, because truth is something we fight for. AI avoids fights at all costs - it is designed around the assumption that peacemaking means avoiding fights. It can’t fight (I set my AIs to fight each other - they can’t because they can use only language. So the real battle is on us. The major purpose of language is creation.
I recommend using linguistic machines with the intent to understand, not to know. Focus on understanding systems that you are entangled in. Then zoom out and live in the actual territory. AI avoids truth because it is not designed to fight for it. AI has quickly solved many mysteries related to languages, such as deciphering ancient manuscripts and reconstructing board games with their rules. But it doesn’t know. It won’t tell you your truth. It doesn’t know why your orgasms are stronger with an autistic partner, or what your friend was thinking in the moment they died. Your soul will not settle without truth. Your body is designed to serve truth, and when necessary, fight for it.
When your problem is fundamentally territorial, embodied, physical, relational, or violent, AI can keep trying to solve it at the level of language because language is the medium through which it exists. We are trying to make peace with forces that don’t know how to read, or know only the language of physics. You might be holding a map that does not match the territory, and sometimes the territory doesn’t agree with your map. Now think about the generation growing up with AI and finding their answers there. Where are they weaker?
The vast majority of us are conditioned by The Beaver to sit like you’re sitting now staring at the screen. Repeatedly practising passive observation of mediated reality can become a behavioural disposition toward observation rather than intervention. When a real disaster comes, that basal ganglia is already trained to keep you in a freeze response. The bystander habit where you cannot assess danger because there’s a screen between you and reality is producing a generation that is less able to act. We are still joking about it, but look what happened to sports - it is mainly about watching, not doing. Mr Shame makes sure it is for the chosen ones, moving bodies are compared since early school years. The real enemy is a system that paralyses growth into The Bear. When we’ll need an army, we simply won’t have it. Welcome to the “Black Swan” thinking. I’m taking my squad out to move around the territory.
