About

Luke F. Walton is the founder and CEO of Surmado, a company building managed AI systems for small businesses. He is also an independent researcher on the ethics of artificial intelligence and, under the name Scoobert Doobert, a musician and producer with close to two decades of released work. He lives in San Diego.

His work runs across software, music, and philosophy, and he treats it as one continuous body of work rather than three separate careers. He performs and records as Scoobert Doobert, is credited as a songwriter and producer under his full name, Luke Francis Walton, and writes and builds under the name Luke F. Walton. All three names refer to the same person.

Surmado builds and operates AI systems for small businesses, centered on an AI agent called Scout that handles the work most owners do not have time for. Walton founded the company and built its early product himself before assembling a team. The premise is that the durable value of AI for a small business is not a chatbot but managed systems someone is accountable for: software that does the job, with a clear owner when it does not.

As a researcher he works on authorship and answerability in automated systems: the question of who, if anyone, is accountable for a decision that an AI shaped but no person authored. His paper "The Decision No One Authored: The Answerability Gap in Generative AI" introduces the answerability gap: cases where humans remain connectable to an AI-shaped outcome, but no one exercised answerable judgment over the evaluative frame that made the outcome what it was. He writes for builders as much as for philosophers, and the work sits alongside the human-oversight provisions of the EU AI Act and the literature on meaningful human control. He publishes under the name Luke F. Walton and is developing related work on the ethics of answer engines.

He has made music since 2007. As Scoobert Doobert he writes, plays, produces, and mixes his own records, with close to 300 compositions registered to date. He remixed and then produced extensively for the band CHAI, including a remix on Sub Pop's WINK TOGETHER and the theme songs to the NHK drama Koisenu Futari and the film The Fish Tale. He has produced and mixed for other artists as well, among them Kerri Medders and singer-songwriter Nina Francis, and his studio work has been profiled in Japan's Sound & Recording Magazine.

Before the solo project he was half of the alternative-pop duo FEiN, fronted The Luke Walton Band, and was a guitarist and co-writer in the band Exist Elsewhere. His songwriting and production credits carry his full name, Luke Francis Walton. His music has appeared on television and in national advertising, and his album Big Hug was nominated for a San Diego Music Award.

Walton hosts Love Music More, a newsletter and podcast on the craft, history, and philosophy of music. He spent several years in the music-products industry, including as associate director of marketing at NAMM, the National Association of Music Merchants, and has written trade journalism on audio and music technology for outlets including NAMM, ProSoundWeb, and Gearspace. He was part of the inaugural class of USC Thornton's popular-music program and holds an MBA from San Diego State University. He has professional working proficiency in Japanese.