As human life migrates to a new technological domain, powerful states race to write its rules.
In his book The Imperative of Responsibility, the philosopher Hans Jonas—who wrote his doctoral dissertation under Martin Heidegger but later repudiated his mentor—describes the profound transformation that modern technology has brought about in man’s relationship with nature. The Greeks, he says, were quite capable of praising humanity’s powers to transform the natural environment, but those powers remained within sharp limits. Our inroads into nature were essentially superficial. There was harmony in the end because human activity left the encompassing nature fundamentally unchanged. At most, it scratched the surface.
