“Geek is our middle name, I guess,” Jim Luisi joked in a recent chat with host Eric Jorgensen, neatly summing up a career spent turning science-fiction daydreams into rigorously researched manuals for the future-minded. The former enterprise architect has published three sprawling works so far—on artificial intelligence, enterprise architecture, and, most recently, artificial consciousness—and he is already deep into book four: Artificial Omnipotence.
Astro Boy and a ten-year apprenticeship
Luisi’s obsession began in childhood, glued to Japanese cartoons where amiable robots saved the day. “My first book was about artificial intelligence,” he recalls. “It took 10 years of research put that book together.” The result, Sensitive by Nature, introduced readers to paradigm shifts so vivid they could “feel” their mental frame slide into a new position. But that clarity demanded discipline: “I wrote that seven times to get it right.”
Defining the undefinable
Book three, Artificial Consciousness: A Journey Beyond AI, posed a tougher puzzle. When Luisi surveyed leading scholars, he discovered that “no one agrees with what consciousness even is. They can’t even agree with what it isn’t.” Most of his effort, he says, was spent on a workable definition: “Most of the entire effort was just to define what consciousness was.” He eventually mapped 24 levels of awareness, from single-cell learning in paramecia to human-grade paradigm-shifting.
Scribe’s Solution: professional polish for a 450-page brain-bender
Translating that taxonomy into an audiobook proved just as daunting. A first vendor racked up “well into … a thousand errors” before walking away. Enter Scribe’s audio team and narrator Jay Snyder. “The timelines were always met. The expectations were always met … It was like I was on vacation working with you guys.”
Total corrections required? Three minor tweaks.
Snyder even nailed the Sanskrit terms sprinkled through Luisi’s Buddhist detours. For an author whose prose ranges from neural nets to non-dualism, that competence was priceless.
Bigger ideas, richer conversations
Publishing the trilogy has changed Luisi’s day-to-day life less than his dinner-table discourse. “It allows me to have conversations with people at a different level than I’ve ever had before because of the amount of thought I had to put into the process,” he says. Those conversations now range from chip-designing AIs at Nvidia to the philosophical fallout of delegating human judgment to machines. And with Artificial Omnipotence he plans to push the debate further, charting a future where hyper-specialized AIs out-reason doctors, lawyers, and, eventually, mission commanders exploring deep space.
Lessons – lighthouse thinking for techno-utopians