1. The introduction in England of the first steam engine marked the beginning of the great industrial revolution that propelled successive waves of technological advancement that created the modern society in which we live today.
2. Modern technology increased step-by-step the role of natural resources and of more and more efficient kinds of machinery while reducing, at the same time, the role of direct human labor in production, transportation, and distribution of all kinds of goods and services.
3. Nevertheless, in the course of the last hundred and fifty years the explosive growth of output made possible by adoption of the new technologies has led to an increase in the total demand for human labor and consequently a substantive rise in its price - that is the level of real wages.
   Up to the beginning of the second world war the length of the labor day and labor year was gradually reduced because workers preferred to use the part of their increasing purchasing power on having more leisure time.
4. Powerful trade unions by exercising their monopolistic power were able to secure wage levels and conditions of employment more favorable than would have prevailed under perfect competitive labor markets. Modern machinery is rapidly depriving them of the ability to do so.
5. It will become more and more profitable, as a result of the latest wave of technological innovation, to replace even highly trained workers by more and more sophisticated electronic equipment.
6. Advanced countries are already entering the age of automation and there can be little doubt that the less developed economies will follow them soon.
   Exhaustion of natural resources, rapidly increasing costs of indispensable environmental protection, combined with falling birth rates will probably lead to a gradual reduction of the present rate of overall economic growth.
7. There is on the other hand no reason to believe that the adoption by competitive market economies of more efficient labor saving methods of production will not continue; it possibly will even accelerate.
8. The question which I would like to ask is: how will our economy, or rather our society, adjust itself to steadily shrinking demand for human labour?
9. Had the free operation of the market forces led to the situation in which the income of each member of the society consisted in approximately the same proportion of wages and capital income, the twin problem of potential structural unemployment and more and more unequal distribution would obviously not exist. In the United States, the most successful of the competitive free market economies, structural unemployment seems to be increasing and so is the difference between the income of the upper income groups - depending mostly on return on invested capital - and the lower income groups living mostly on their wages.
10. The answer to the question raised above seems to consist in supplementing the operation of the competitive market mechanism by transfer of income by such means as social insurance, free education and health care, as well as provision of other kinds of free services financed by taxes. In the United States more than twenty-five per cent of national income is now being redistributed in this way; in Europe as you know the percentage is certainly higher. What could be called surplus labor is being already absorbed by all the provision of essentially free public services.
11. What will happen in the future cannot be predicted, but I venture to suggest that while the powerful driving force of a free competitive market mechanism will continue to operate, the distribution of larger and larger portions of national income and the allocation of larger and larger amounts of what might be called surplus labor will be determined by public institutions operating outside of it.

The resulting essay has been translated into Italian and published in the book Scienza e società. Dieci Nobel per il futuro. (Marsilio, Venezia 1995).