‘Various machines also existed before modernity: the builders of the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages also had considerable engineering and pragmatic knowledge, so it was not that they lacked the necessary knowledge, but above all they lacked the formulation and application of the machinic idea. The view that we must ceaselessly improve the human destiny by taking human destiny “into our own hands” is a historically new development, not much older than a couple of centuries at most.’