Nothing could be more obvious than the impact of science and technology on our national life - indeed, on our very survival.
     But because our attention is focused so largely on the dramatic and the spectacular - on satellites and missiles and space exploration - we may tend to lose sight of the almost routine interrelation of scientific advance and our day-to-day lives: in the fields of health and nutrition, communications of every form, business and industry, and all the processes of an abundant and productive living standard. The potentials opened to us by science and technology - for our material convenience and our cultural growth - are limitless.
     This close and constant interrelationship raises two great problems for all of us. The first, of course, is the critical need to train scientists and engineers, skilled in the latest developments of this new and revolutionary age and prepared to push still farther ahead.
     But there is a second and equally important area of concern. We also need scientific education for the general public. If our national scientific effort is to be maintained, the American people must have deeper motivations than simply a desire for immediate practical benefits. This new age will require of the public generally a high degree of scientific literacy and the blending of science into our total culture and way of life.
     Increasingly, major national decisions - political, economic and social - involve scientific and technological decisions. Obtaining adequate public support for projects with obvious military value is relatively easy. But we need a high level of public understanding to develop sound, long-term national policies and programs.
     It is not a question of making every citizen into a scientist: what we must try to do is provide for the nonscientists the insight and understanding with respect to science that we have historically sought to give all our citizens in the general field of the humanities. What we need is continued public support for basic research.
     This will require a judicious sense of balance. We must avoid turning out future generations of scientific materialists or automatons. By balancing scientific and humane education, our aim must be men and women in every field who are ready to assume the total responsibilities of citizenship in a free society.
     This, I find, is a view which is held by all our top scientists. They well recognize the need for highly trained scientists and engineers if we are to maintain our position of world leadership.
     But we must not and will not depend on forced-draft or on arbitrary selection. The scientists and engineers who have contributed so much to America's greatness chose their careers freely. They realized the importance of this work; they were challenged by its vast frontiers; they saw its opportunities and were willing to undergo the rigorous preparation. They made their choice with greater freedom than is allowed anywhere else in the world.
     This is the crucial ingredient of America's scientific and technological greatness up to now - and so it must continue to be.

     Today we stand on the threshold of a new industrial revolution - the revolution of automation. This is a revolution bright with the hope of a new prosperity for labor and a new abundance for America - but it is also a revolution which carries the dark menace of industrial dislocation, increasing unemployment, and deepening poverty.
     Already entire automobile engines are being manufactured, untouched by human hands. Modern lathes and drills are turning out parts machined to the closest tolerances, guided only by electrical impulses which make the settings and automatically correct all errors. Electronic equipment is sorting material as it enters a warehouse and carrying it - without human guidance - to its proper place of storage. And in the future, as the complexity, the versatility, and the precision of modern technology continue their inevitable advance, thousands of processes and functions now performed by men will be done, more cheaply and more efficiently, by machine.
     These revolutionary changes in the nature of our industrial system are a challenge to our leadership, our vision, and our resourcefulness. For the steady replacement of men by machines - the advance of automation - is already threatening to destroy thousands of jobs and wipe out entire plants. It is creating fear among workers, and among the families of workers. It is menacing the existence of entire communities. And it can create poverty and want and even hunger - as it has already done in the coal mines of West Virginia where I saw the sad spectacle of men, displaced by machines, unable to find work, unable to shelter their families, and unable to feed their children - the forgotten children of the richest country in the history of the world.
     But this is not the inevitable product of advancing technology. We have not created new machines so that they can destroy our prosperity and our economic health. Today - as we have done in the past - we must translate our skill and our inventive genius into abundance and strength and a better life for all Americans.
     Only because advancing knowledge has been adapted to the production of goods, are washing machines, and television sets, and automobiles and electric lights and a thousand other products, now within the range of the average income. And only because of new discoveries do we enjoy the unparalleled luxury of being the first Nation ever to worry about an overabundance of goods. The history of man's economic progress has been the history of such discoveries: Looms replaced hand weavers. Electric motors replaced human muscle. Bulldozers and hydraulic lifts have replaced men digging with shovels and straining at heavy weights. And each advance - each more efficient machine - has not only increased production and raised our standard of living but it has also improved drastically the hours and the conditions of labor. In an 8-hour day, 5-day week, the modern worker produces more than twice as much as his grandfather did, working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.
     And there is no reason why the advances of the future - like those of the past - should not bring even greater changes, easing the conditions of labor, shortening hours, lightening work, and bringing new and cheaper and better products into every American home.
     But if this vision of a stronger and more prosperous America is to become a reality - if automation is to be the key to a brighter future rather than the forerunner of economic distress - then labor and management and Government must work together to ease the inevitable dislocations and hardships which this new industrial revolution will bring. No one - especially labor - is opposed to economic progress. No one wants to work the old, back-breaking way if there is an easier way to do the job. No worker and no labor leader wants to stand in the way of America's economic growth. No one wants to keep his fellow worker from sharing the benefits of increased productivity. But our workers do want assurance that they will not be tossed on the scrap heap and forgotten like so many obsolete machines - that they will not be the neglected victims of industrial change, shut off from the new richness which their skill and labor has helped to create.
     This, then, is the challenge to American leadership: to welcome and stimulate technological progress - with its promise of increasing productivity - while providing new jobs and new hope for the victims of industrial advance.