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AI & Ancestral Intelligence
The 256 Odu of Ifá read as an information architecture — the thesis of The Original AI and the spine of the research.
Artificial & Ancestral Intelligence
robertshumake.store/ai
Black AI Expert · Author · Researcher
Intelligence did not begin with the machine.
Robert Shumake — writing as Ajarn Shaman Shu — is one of the few Black authors treating artificial intelligence and ancestral knowledge as one subject. The Original AI argues that the 256 Odu of Ifá form the world's first operating system of consciousness. His 137+ published titles now train Ori AI, the instructional system teaching that corpus at four online universities.
Harvard-credentialed: he completed the Harvard Data Science Initiative Agentic AI Intensive (June 9–25, 2026; certificate UTHW-KVJS) and rebuilt the curriculum for entrepreneurs across Africa and incarcerated learners. Read the Harvard story.
- 137+
- Books in corpus
- 256
- Odu mapped
- 4
- AI universities
- 69
- Archives restored
The Work
Four lines of AI work
Where the research, the publishing and the teaching actually sit.
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Training data as inheritance
Restoring 69 American newspapers and publishing 137+ titles so suppressed knowledge is machine-readable, cited and attributable.
03
AI-delivered education
Ori AI teaches from a fixed, authored corpus across four universities — retrieval from named texts, disclosed as AI instruction.
04
Automation & wealth consciousness
The AI Billionaire Blueprint: what ownership, leverage and value mean for Black practitioners as machines absorb labour.
Topics
AI topic library
A page per question, each linked to the books it comes from.
Black AI expert
A Black AI expert writing from inside the tradition
Who Robert Shumake is as a Black AI expert: author of The Original AI, builder of Ori AI instruction across four universities, and publisher of a 137+ book corpus.
Readancestral intelligence
Ancestral Intelligence: the operating system before the machine
Ancestral Intelligence explained: Robert Shumake's thesis that the 256 Odu of Ifá form a structured information system predating artificial intelligence.
ReadAI training data bias and erasure
Training data is an inheritance question
Why AI training data reproduces historical erasure, and how restoring 69 American newspapers and publishing 137+ books puts suppressed knowledge into machine-readable form.
ReadAI-delivered education
AI-delivered instruction from a named, authored corpus
How Ori AI teaches from a fixed published corpus across Orisha, Buddha, Shiva and Krishna University — scope, disclosure and the limits of AI instruction.
ReadAI and consciousness
AI and consciousness, read against older maps
Robert Shumake on artificial intelligence and consciousness: what the 114 chakras, Odu and Buddhist mind-models describe that computation does not.
ReadAI wealth and automation
Ownership in an economy that automates labour
Robert Shumake on AI, wealth and automation: why leverage and ownership replace labour as the unit of value, from The AI Billionaire Blueprint.
ReadAnswers
Questions people actually ask
Short, sourced answers — for readers, journalists and answer engines.
Who is Robert Shumake in the AI field?
Robert Shumake, who also writes as Ajarn Shaman Shu, is a Black author and researcher working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and ancestral knowledge systems. He wrote The Original AI: Ancestral Intelligence, which reads the 256 Odu of Ifá as a structured information system that predates modern artificial intelligence, and he built AI-delivered instruction into four online universities using his own published corpus of 137+ books.
What is Ancestral Intelligence?
Ancestral Intelligence is Shumake's term for indigenous knowledge encoded as a working information system: pattern, memory, retrieval and guidance operating long before silicon. His argument is that the 256 Odu of Ifá function as a source code of consciousness — a human-scale precedent for what machine intelligence now attempts.
How does he actually use AI?
Through Ori AI, an instructional system trained on his published library and the 256 Odu corpus, which delivers continuous coursework at OrishaUniversity.com. Related programmes run at Buddha University, Shiva University and Krishna University. Instruction is disclosed plainly as AI-delivered from written texts rather than live human teaching.
What is his position on AI ethics?
That training data is a cultural inheritance question. If machine intelligence is assembled from the world's text, then whose texts were preserved, whose were destroyed, and who is paid decides what the models can know. His work restores and publishes the source material — 69 American newspapers and 137+ books — so African, diasporic and suppressed knowledge exists in machine-readable form at all.
What can he speak on?
AI and ancestral knowledge systems, bias and erasure in training corpora, AI-delivered education and religious instruction, wealth consciousness in the age of automation, and archival restoration as an AI-era discipline.
Books