The Anthropocene refers to the idea that, particularly since the mid-20th century, humans have created a new geological epoch through our transformational impact on the Earth. Earlier this month, the Anthropocene Working Group, an international team of scientists, claimed they had found clear evidence of the beginning of the Anthropocene in a lake in Ontario, Canada. In the lake’s depths, sedimentary evidence was found of radioactive plutonium and hazardous fly ash from the burning of fossil fuels. 

The havoc we have wreaked on our environment is why the Anthropocene epoch may be our last. Humanity has been talking about the apocalypse for thousands of years. But in 2023, as we grapple with the hottest temperatures ever recorded, the imminent threat of climate disaster and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, there is a greater urgency to the questions some are asking about what the world would really look like without us. Would it be better to leave the Earth to the animals, to the trees, even to the rocks? And would the world be a safer and more benevolent place if we let AI robots run everything? 

In “The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us,” the American poet and critic Adam Kirsch interrogates the prospect of a world that is no longer dominated by humans — either because we have driven ourselves to extinction or because we have been replaced by artificial intelligence. Sitting in a sweltering Rome on the hottest day ever recorded in the ancient capital, I spoke to Adam Kirsch on the phone in New York City, where the air quality index hovered near hazardous because of the wildfire smoke drifting over from Canada. It was difficult not to talk about the “end times.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.