developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to
assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly
because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and
revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on
the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly
regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it
was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various
devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage,
have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and
the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully
repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there.
From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to
all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a
great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were
used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and
disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without
being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by
producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the
machine did raise the living standards of the