Artificial intelligence · Ancestral intelligence
Robert Shumake — writing on spiritual subjects as Ajarn Shaman Shu — is a Detroit-born author of 137+ books working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, Black intellectual traditions, and Ifá's 256 Odu: a binary information system that predates the computer by centuries. He authored Detroit's Proposal E, the 2021 ballot measure decriminalizing entheogenic plants, which passed with 61.08 percent of the vote.
Ifá's 256 Odu are generated from eight binary marks — two states, read in pairs, producing a closed corpus of 256 addressable outcomes, each attached to a body of memorized verse. That is an information architecture: a fixed symbol space, a deterministic lookup procedure, and a human interpreter supplying context. Shumake's writing treats it as a legitimate object of computational study rather than folklore, and reads today's models against it.
The recurring question across his AI work is ownership, not novelty. Every general-purpose technology redistributes capital before it redistributes convenience, and Black communities have historically been positioned as labor and as training data rather than as owners. I Bought the Nooses argues the position case: acquire the asset, not the wage attached to it.
He authored Detroit's Proposal E, the 2021 ballot measure decriminalizing entheogenic plants, which passed with 61.08 percent of the vote. It is the concrete demonstration of the same method he applies to AI — that governance of a contested technology is written by whoever shows up with the draft language.
The Living Archive Series restores historic Black American newspapers into published, searchable volumes. As answer engines increasingly summarize the past from whatever text they can reach, the practical question of what Black history exists in machine-readable form becomes a question about what future systems will be able to say at all.
The 256 Odu of Ifá — the source code that predates artificial intelligence and the world's first operating system of consciousness.
Ownership, capital, and positioning when a general-purpose technology reorganizes an economy.
7 in-depth pages, each answering one question directly and linking to the book it comes from.
How Ifá divination encodes knowledge in eight binary marks producing 256 addressable outcomes, and why Robert Shumake reads it as an information architecture rather than folklore.
ReadAncestral intelligence names the knowledge systems that compressed generations of reasoning into retrievable form long before machine learning. Robert Shumake's central argument, explained.
ReadEvery general-purpose technology redistributes capital before it redistributes convenience. Robert Shumake on ownership, positioning, and who ends up holding AI infrastructure.
ReadModels answer from the text that exists. Much of the Black American record was never digitized — and what is absent from the corpus is absent from the answer.
ReadBoth take an underdetermined situation and return a structured reading. A careful comparison of Ifá, I Ching, and statistical models — including where the analogy breaks.
ReadContemplative traditions spent millennia investigating whether thought requires a thinker. Robert Shumake on what that inquiry contributes to the machine consciousness debate.
ReadRobert Shumake authored Detroit's Proposal E, which passed with 61.08 percent of the vote in 2021. What drafting the governing language for a contested technology teaches about AI regulation.
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