Podcast · Book 101 Review · 14 November 2026
On Book 101 Review, Ritu Raj talks with host Daniel Lucas about The Unalgorithmic Self: why a machine can generate an image but not an impression, why accountability outranks efficiency, and one practice anyone can start today: answer first, then ask the machine.
From the conversation
“Before you ask the machine anything that matters, write your own answer first. Then ask. Then ask it to argue against you.”
“Disclosed, not disowned. Say how it was made, then sign it.”
“You can model a person, but you cannot meet a model.”
The interview
Book 101 Review, Universal Podcast Network, 14 November 2026. Edited for reading from the episode: false starts, repetitions and asides removed.
I never saw it until now. As a kid I lived among my father and the artists around him. Then came the technology world and startup companies, and I had almost forgotten my passion for painting. During COVID, locked in a room, I came back to my first love. Within months my loft in San Francisco was full of paintings and paint. Then an opportunity came in Phoenix: a house with a studio of its own. I jumped at it. My dream was to paint like Jackson Pollock, on large canvases laid on the floor.
Two things. First, painting is not a nine-to-five job. You paint when the painting comes, and then you don't. In the gaps I started writing, and I discovered that when I didn't have a brush in my hand, words could be my brush and the page my canvas. That is where the writing began. Second, I woke up one day and had to face the fact that I live inside an algorithm. I buy a toothbrush, but the toothbrush is not what I am buying; somebody sold it to me. I watch a show I love, and it pulls my heart in exactly the directions it was built to. They are running an algorithm, and I am part of it. So I began asking: who am I inside this algorithm? That question became the book.
I now live in one creative bubble of language, art and philosophy, and they all come together. They were there when I was building companies too; now the effort is focused. A line from the book is: a machine can generate an image, but not an impression. The book asks what lives in that gap: the body, memory, imagination, love and responsibility.
It is taking a break from the algorithm that lives our life, long enough to look at your own self: the things algorithms cannot manage. You can model a person, but you cannot meet a model.
First, the future narrows to the past. An algorithm returns what resembles what we chose before. Comfort becomes repetition, and it sells itself. Abstraction moves the other way, toward a world we did not know was there. Second, we forget how to choose. No one takes the choice away. We hand it over bit by bit because it is easier, and the muscle weakens. Hence: answer first, then ask the machine. Third, a relationship has no algorithm. A person cannot be specified in advance, so a relationship cannot be automated, only the transactions around it.
Machines can do almost anything today, and it amazes me. But I can only speak for myself. When I paint abstractly, something comes up from underneath, as if the ground tells me how the painting will be. I am not tracing anything. The colours, the texture, everything comes to me. It is not always right. But it comes to me, and that is what the line means.
Responsibility: being accountable. AI can write and manage faster than you, absolutely. But you must be the author, the person who signs the document and says this is mine. Many of us use AI to avoid embarrassment, if our English is not strong, for example, and it genuinely helps. The one thing is to disclose who is writing. You cannot make a painting with AI and say the AI made it when people dislike it, and that you made it when they love it. In both cases, you made it. In management and everywhere else, the question that matters is who signs.
It keeps changing. The Unalgorithmic Self was written, as the cover says, in open conversation with an AI model, with the ideas and values firmly mine. My rule is disclosed, not disowned: say how it was made, then sign it. The worst thing you can say is that the AI made it. Machines don't threaten what makes us human. Forgetting ourselves does. AI makes human authorship more visible, because now it is a choice.
It was my own problem. I have made more than 250 abstract paintings, and it is hard to show people work with nothing figurative to hold on to. If words could say what an abstract painting is, it would not be abstract. Abstract art has never had a language. If I could give it one, even in symbols, people could stand in front of a painting and stay, instead of moving on because they don't understand. A sunflower in a painting makes you happy. Abstraction makes you think, from what matters most to you.
The Shape of Seeing is about one realisation: abstract art lives in the seeing, not in anything else. The Unalgorithmic Self reaches the same place by a different route. It is about how algorithms narrow what we see in our own lives. You become a hamster in a wheel, seeing what the algorithm wants you to see. There is nothing wrong with that in itself. I love my shows, and I love my algorithms. But both books are about seeing for yourself.
To be with myself: my soul, my relationships, what is important to me. When I paint, the world stops, and I step into a new one.
The argument is still in the making. If I had it finished, I would be preaching from the Himalayas. Automation will keep doing more. When did you last multiply two three-digit numbers in your head? You reach for the calculator, and why not. The one thing is disclosure. Disclose so that you remain you: disclosed, not disowned. That is the mantra I am working with, in relationships and in AI. It is a work in progress.
Human interactions are messy. We bring in AI to give them structure, and tidy structures kill creativity. They lose the very point of a relationship. It is in the mess that we discover other people. My wife and I can have a messy day, then sit down together and make a little dinner, and I love that we get that. Replace the mess with an efficient algorithm and you lose creativity and human ingenuity.
A person. A machine will say it made no mistake; it did what it did. Only a human being can sign off and say I am accountable, and that is the most important part of being human.
Both. I am optimistic about the efficiency: what took ten or twenty programmers, one model can now zip through. The worry is who signs off on the result. Book a trip through several AI systems, arrive, and there is no flight: who answers for that? Always a human. Accountability supersedes efficiency.
It needs to hear one thing clearly: who is signing the document, and who owns what? After thirty years in Silicon Valley, that is what matters most to me. An AI will not say I am responsible. Only a person can. Efficiency is not accountability. Hire people who hold themselves accountable for what they deliver, not people who say the AI delivered it.
Tech people think artists are airy: ten cups of tea, ten glasses of wine, and nothing in between. Sometimes that is true. Artists think tech people have no empathy and are only out to make money. They are two worlds that don't know how to talk to each other. I spend eight to ten hours a day in the studio.
Answer first, then ask the machine. Before you ask the machine anything that matters, write your own answer first. Then ask. Then ask it to argue against you. We have the best argument machine in the world. Let it argue against you.
Anyone living inside this AI world and asking how it changes their life, and who they are inside such an efficient system. Not only artists, executives or managers. Everyone. Every one of us has a soul, and at the end of the day the book is about protecting it.
We love to be told what to do. That is why algorithms are so powerful, and why thinking for ourselves feels like work. Thirty-five years of building companies taught me that. So trust your own self before you reach for what is easy and comfortable.
The books
Art, AI, and the Future of Human Thinking
The part of human life that refuses reduction. Not a book against AI. A book about remembering ourselves.
The Genesis of Abstraction
Painting, perception, silence and attention, and the length of string that became the Organic Movement paintings.
More
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Art that listens.