Podcast · The Digital Transformation Podcast · 11 November 2026
On The Digital Transformation Podcast, Ritu Raj talks with host Kevin Craine about what AI cannot reach, why the real risk is a machine that is fluently wrong with no one owning the answer, what writing The Unalgorithmic Self with an AI model taught him, and what leaders should build for now.
From the conversation
“Intelligence will be cheap. Judgment, trust and meaning will be expensive. Build for those.”
“The risk isn’t that AI gets it wrong. It’s that it gets it fluently wrong, and nobody owns the answer.”
“A machine can generate a story. Only a human can live one.”
The interview
The Digital Transformation Podcast, 11 November 2026. Edited for reading from the episode: false starts, repetitions and asides removed.
One day I realized that I am living inside an algorithm. Everything around me is one. The toothbrush I buy is sold to me by an algorithm. Everywhere I go is shaped by one, and AI, for the most part, is an algorithm. So I wrote this book to return us to being human: to the things AI cannot do, the things that are not part of its equation.
I was born in India into a family where my father was an art critic. He wrote about modern Indian art, and I grew up among those artists. I didn't want to be an artist; I didn't want to be poor. But I caught my father's passion, and theirs. Those artists were altering the conditions of thinking in India. It was the years after independence from the British, and modernism gave people the freedom to speak and a new language to speak in, where expression had been shut down. So for me abstract art is an expression of freedom from a strict regime of thinking. That is what married the two for me: the companies I built in Silicon Valley and the paintings.
A line from the book: the risk isn't that AI gets it wrong. It's that it gets it fluently wrong, and nobody owns the answer. A machine cannot own its mistake, and that is the biggest issue I see. I love AI; it brings me a great deal of efficiency. But it never says, I'm sorry, I made a mistake. It is like children playing games at the dinner table: the characters die, and you revive them. No one experiences the full breadth of human emotion. We are only at the beginning of this. The stories about AI's big mistakes are nothing next to what it does to us. For the sake of efficiency, we are losing our human selves.
Build it. The gains in efficiency are massive. But the same leaders have to answer one question: who is accountable? You can't say the machine is. You are, and so are your project managers and your leads. That is the gap I see. Take it further and it comes down to the soul of a human being, to love. A machine cannot love. There is a line near the beginning of the book that I love: a machine can generate a story; only a human can live one.
For all my editing. It makes me a smoother writer. My mother was a professor of English literature, and with AI my English passes her grade. As a painter, though, I work with my hands. I paint with a string, not even a brush, and I have no control over the medium. That is the beauty of it for me. It gives me a freedom AI cannot.
I was clear where the book was going. My hands were on the rudder all the time. And where it was going was this question: where have we lost the soul of being human? We are bombarded with algorithmic content all the time, and it is easy to lose your soul in it. I love my shows; I go out to buy something; and I get lost completely.
In our relationships, with other people and with ourselves. Writing the book was easier because the AI filled in between my words and sentences, and it kept the structure of the book well set. And it argued with me, in many places: this is not right. But it cannot argue with me about love.
Yes. I have a tendency to exaggerate, a very human thing: to make everything sound like flowers. It caught that. It is a very useful creative partner. What I brought to the book were small nuggets, mental models. I would wake in the night with one, go to the computer, type it, and it would put it all together. That was the genius of it. But every AI has tics, the way every writer does. One is saying “this, not that.” It reads beautifully to you, and a reader who isn't used to AI finds it irritating. So every book I write goes through two rounds of editing. The first takes out the tics that ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini left behind. Once the language is clean, the second works on the substance. That is for writing a good book, not a short email.
For the next four or five years, we won't. That is the fact. AI is remarkably good at gathering facts and bringing them to you. The real question is who holds the authority. Are you handing it to AI to make your life easier, or does your own voice remain the authority? In business that is the biggest thing. You are accountable for the results. The machine has no accountability; it costs twenty-five dollars a month.
One: keep an uncertainty hour a day, a space where you don't have to be certain about anything. Two: before delegating, name who answers when it is wrong. Three: write your never-automate list this quarter, the things you could automate but won't.
Intelligence will be cheap. Judgment, trust and meaning will be expensive. Build for those.
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
All conversations are on the podcasts page; reviews and press are on the media page. To book Ritu for a show, write to ritu@rituart.com.
Art that listens.