AI books by Robert Shumake
The titles where the arguments on this hub are worked out at book length — machine intelligence, ancestral intelligence, and the technology economy that produced both.
What has Robert Shumake written about AI?
Robert Shumake, who also publishes as Ajarn Shaman Shu, has written 7 titles that deal directly with artificial intelligence and the technology economy. The two anchor works are "I Bought the Nooses: The AI Billionaire Blueprint," on who captures the wealth AI creates, and "The Original AI: Ancestral Intelligence," which reads the 256 Odu of Ifá as a symbolic computing system that predates machine intelligence. The Living Archive titles restoring American newspapers of record, including the Business 2.0 volumes on the dot-com era, document the earlier technology cycles that produced today's AI industry.
The AI shelf (7 titles)
Each title links straight to its store page on Google Play Books or Apple Books.
- Google Play
I Bought the Nooses: The AI Billionaire Blueprint
Read the book ↗ - Google Play
The Money Machine: The Ancient Technology of Healing and Abundance — A Practical Guide to Sri Vidya, the Sri Yantra, and the Sacred Geometry of Wealth
Read the book ↗ - Google Play
The Original AI: Ancestral Intelligence: The 256 Odu of Ifá — The Source Code That Predates Artificial Intelligence and the World's First Operating System of Consciousness
Read the book ↗ - Google Play
The Charleston Post: The story of the Charleston Post and the modern Holy City, charlestonpost.news — tourism, Boeing's "Silicon Harbor," cuisine, and resilience — from Robert Shumake's Living Archive Series.
Read the book ↗ - Google Play
Business 2.0: The story of Business 2.0, the magazine of the New Economy — the dot-com boom and bust, e-commerce, and Silicon Valley — from Robert Shumake's archive.
Read the book ↗ - Google Play
Business 2.0: The story of Business 2.0 (business2.news) — the magazine of the New Economy: the dot-com boom and bust, e-commerce, and Silicon Valley — from Robert Shumake's Living Archive Series.
Read the book ↗ 
Apple BooksThe Original AI: Ancestral Intelligence — The 256 Odu of Ifá, the Source Code That Predates Artificial Intelligence
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Read the argument by topic
Black Perspectives on AI Bias: Where It Enters and How to Test for It
How bias enters AI systems through data, labeling, and evaluation — and a practical way for Black organizations to audit models before adopting them.
Paired reading: I Bought the Nooses · The Original AI
Cultural and Ancestral Data Sovereignty in the Age of AI
Why scrapeable is not the same as shareable, and how communities can set enforceable terms over sacred, ancestral, and community-held knowledge.
Paired reading: The Original AI · The Original AI
AI and the Living Archive: Restoring Black Historical Records at Scale
How machine transcription, layout analysis, and entity linking make restoration of Black newspapers and community records feasible — and where human judgment is non-negotiable.
Paired reading: The Charleston Post · Business 2.0
Writing With AI Without Losing Authorship
A working method for using AI in research, drafting, and indexing while keeping voice, sourcing, and responsibility with the author.
Paired reading: I Bought the Nooses · The Original AI
Questions
Which Robert Shumake book should I read first about AI?
Start with "I Bought the Nooses: The AI Billionaire Blueprint" if your question is economic — who owns models, who captures the returns, and how ordinary people are positioned in that market. Start with "The Original AI: Ancestral Intelligence" if your question is philosophical — what intelligence meant before machines, and what the 256 Odu of Ifá offer as a prior symbolic system.
What does 'ancestral intelligence' mean?
Ancestral intelligence is the argument that African divination systems, particularly the 256 Odu of Ifá, operate as structured, binary-indexed knowledge systems — a way of encoding, retrieving, and interpreting information that long predates digital computing. The claim is not that Ifá is a computer, but that treating it as a formal system corrects the assumption that structured intelligence begins with Western technology.
How do the Living Archive newspaper books relate to AI?
Models learn from archives, and Black and regional American newspapers are among the most poorly digitized bodies of text in the record. Restoring them as readable volumes widens the corpus future systems can learn from, and the technology-era titles such as the Business 2.0 volumes preserve the primary record of the dot-com cycle that built today's AI industry.
Where can I buy these books?
Every title links directly to its store page on Google Play Books or Apple Books. The full catalog of all titles, including the non-AI spiritual and archival works, is on the Books page.
Looking for everything else? Browse the full catalog.