From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.

A lot of people, myself included, are worried about where technology is taking the human race,

and especially how we can stay human in an age of artificial intelligence.

But my guest this week thinks that we're not worried enough. That some kind of apocalypse is all but inevitable if it isn't already upon us, and that what we need now

are strategies of resistance, endurance, and escape. And he practices what he preaches,

having retreated to the west of Ireland with his family,

the better to keep them out of the clutches of what he calls the machine. But he's come back to

us for a time, bearing a prophetic message. Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist and critic, an environmental

activist, and a convert to Eastern

Orthodoxy. And his new book is entitled Against the Machine on the Unmaking of Humanity.

Paul Kings North, welcome to interesting times. Thank you very much. I think that's a good thing. I'm not

sure. Well, we'll find out. But we're going to start with your life, because you don't just

critique technological civilization. You have also at least somewhat withdrawn from it.

You're here in New York City promoting this book, but once book promotion is done, you will return to Western

Ireland, where you have lived for some time with your wife and children. Can you tell me about that?

Well, I live on a few acres of land in a little house in County Galway in Ireland. You can probably

tell for my accent that I don't come from Ireland. I come from England. I grew up in urban England. I worked there for a long time. I lived there for a long time, but both my wife and I, well, when you have children, it really focuses you on the shape of the world, the stories you want to tell them, the life you want to live. And we were quite clear for a long time that we wanted to try and escape the

machine, escape the rat race if we could. And we wanted to homeschool our children. We wanted to

teach them ourselves. We wanted to give them some time in nature. We wanted to take them away from

the screens which are enveloping absolutely every aspect of education and life for children.

So we kind of jumped ship. We left England and we moved to rural island as a kind of

a life experiment. We wanted to grow food. We wanted to try to be semi self-sufficient, try to be

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