Zebonastic
By Bear Brown & Company
Welcome to Zebonastic. This site is under construction.
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The Series
Five courses, each targeting a distinct human capacity that remains beyond the reach of current AI. Taken together, they form a map of what makes human intelligence irreducible.
BOTSPEAK
Fluency in AI communication. How to talk to machines — and know when they're talking past you. Prompt engineering, model limitations, hallucination detection, and the rhetorical gap between human intent and machine output.
Explore BotSpeak →CAUSAL REASONING
AI finds correlations. Humans build causal models. Counterfactual thinking, interventionist reasoning, and the kind of "why" questions that statistical models cannot answer.
Explore Causal Reasoning →ETHICAL PLAY
Moral reasoning under uncertainty, value pluralism, and the limits of rule-based ethics. Developing the capacity for ethical judgment that cannot be reduced to optimization or alignment.
Explore Ethical Play →AIMAGINEERING
Generative AI produces outputs. Humans produce meaning. Creative process, aesthetic judgment, conceptual blending, and the difference between novelty and genuine originality.
Explore AIMagineering →EMBODIED TEACHING
Teaching is irreducibly human. Presence, improvisation, emotional attunement, and the embodied skills that make mentorship effective — none of which transfer to a language model.
Explore Embodied Teaching →CONDUCTING AI
The five supervisory capacities: plausibility auditing, problem formulation, tool orchestration, interpretive judgment, and executive integration. The course that teaches you to conduct the orchestra, not play every instrument.
Explore Conducting AI →THE AI SHERPA
A practitioner's guide for experiential learning. The full 18-chapter arc — from design failure diagnosis through the Sherpa infrastructure to domain field guides for co-op, study abroad, clinical, trades, and corporate early career programs.
Explore The AI Sherpa →Who This Is For
This series is for practitioners who already use AI and need a framework for understanding where it stops and human judgment begins.
FOR ENGINEERS
- —AI-tool-capable but no framework for evaluating outputs
- —Need to distinguish correlation from causation in model behavior
- —Building systems that require human judgment at the boundary
- —Want to understand what their tools actually can't do
FOR EDUCATORS
- —Deploying AI in embodied, relational domains
- —Need to preserve what makes teaching human
- —Designing curricula that develop irreducibly human skills
- —Preparing students for a world shaped by AI
FOR DESIGNERS
- —Need judgment before and after the tool runs
- —Distinguishing generative novelty from genuine originality
- —Building creative processes that use AI without depending on it
- —Developing aesthetic criteria that machines cannot replicate
Begin the Sequence
The series starts with BotSpeak — learning to communicate with AI systems clearly, critically, and without illusion. Each subsequent course builds on the last, developing the human capacities that no model can replicate.
Bear Brown & Company
Zebonastic is a production of Bear Brown & Company. For questions, reach out directly.