You are best known for your writing on liberal democracy and the nature of politics, but your recent book, The Great Disruption, dealt in part with information technology, and your new book, Our Posthuman Future, deals with biotechnology. How is your concern with liberal democracy and political institutions connected to your concern with new technologies?
The issue that I've been thinking about for some time has to do with this whole question of how technology impacts politics. It actually started with a study group on the information revolution and world politics that I started seven or eight years ago, and it gradually broadened because the sponsor really liked it and said, “why don’t you look atother issues in science,” one of which was biotechnology. The more I started thinking about biotechnology and reading about it, the more it seemed to me that this was the more consequential of the two ongoing technology revolutions. So that was one origin of my interest.