A Black AI expert writing from inside the tradition
Robert Shumake, who also publishes as Ajarn Shaman Shu, is a Black author and researcher working where artificial intelligence meets ancestral knowledge systems. He wrote The Original AI: Ancestral Intelligence, which reads the 256 Odu of Ifá as a structured information system predating machine intelligence, and he built AI-delivered instruction on top of his own 137+ book corpus at four online universities.
His expertise is unusual in shape. It is not model engineering; it is corpus authorship — deciding what knowledge exists in machine-readable form at all, who wrote it, and how a system trained on it should teach.
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Questions people ask
What makes him an AI expert rather than an author writing about AI?
He authored the corpus, defined the retrieval scope and deployed the instructional system. Ori AI teaches from his published texts and the 256 Odu at OrishaUniversity.com, with parallel programmes at Buddha, Shiva and Krishna University. The subject matter, the training material and the delivery system are the same body of work.
Why does 'Black AI expert' matter as a category?
Because models learn from what survived. African, diasporic and Black American knowledge was disproportionately unpublished, unarchived or destroyed, so it is thin in training data. Practitioners who both hold that knowledge and publish it in machine-readable form change what any future model can say about it.
What does he speak on?
AI and ancestral knowledge systems, bias and erasure in training corpora, AI-delivered religious and academic instruction, automation and wealth consciousness, and archival restoration as an AI-era discipline.
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Related AI topics
ancestral 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.
AI 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.
AI-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.