Very few people are happy with the way technology has come to dominate our lives, argues author Andy Crouch, and he thinks it will take a while for humans to reclaim autonomy from machines.

“I rarely meet anyone who thinks, ‘Oh, it's really working quite well,’” Crouch, the author of a new book, said in an interview. “I just don't meet anyone who thinks we're in great shape and should just keep kind of on the path we're on.”

Crouch’s book, “The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World,” identifies one of the core problems of our time as a “breakdown of recognition.”

“Our neurology is actually wired for this kind of face-to-face encounter. It's when another person really attends to me and knows what I'm feeling, and in a way thinking, that I can fully be myself,” said Crouch, a former executive editor at Christianity Today magazine who has written four other books on culture-making, the ethical and moral uses of power, and how to use technology rather than be used by it.

There are, Crouch said, “fewer and fewer settings that I'm in where I can expect that another person knows who I am, knows what it's like to be me.”

Crouch has already written a book in 2017 called “The Techwise Family,” which has plenty of practical advice. But his latest book is harder to categorize, as Crouch struggles with how to recover our humanity. His answers to this question are unconventional.

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