[373] not hesitate to say, against some of my romantic friends who are terribly afraid of automation, that even automation carried through radically has a great liberating power. The more things which can be subject to automation ARE subject to it, the less unnecessary mechanical work has to be done by man. One has metaphorically called the machines "slaves." They are not slaves because in the slave- relationship, there is an element of person-to-person relationship, and if this is not accepted by the master, he not only destroys the slave but also himself. Machine^a has not such a relationship; it is merely tool, and it liberates man--in this case especially the worker--from activities which can be taken over. When we speak about the machine age, or the age of automation, or however we call it, we never forget, for a romanticizing theology, the liberating blessing produced by the machine, even in its most complicated and most radical forms. It is good to see, when you are as old as I am,

how from my youth, when even the building of a railway in which I participated nine years (of course very successfully), namely putting sand into a car with your hands and then pushing it to the place where it should go--now all this was done in Eastern Germany by Polish workers at that time, and I was their intimate friend and helped them. Now, when I see what is going on today, when you build a road or railway, there was almost nothing like this done by hands, by activities of the muscle, but by somebody sitting somewhere and directing the machine-- the machine grasps, the machine runs, the machine fills, the machine puts out in on its place, etc. Now this is a tremendous thing. I don't speak here about the problem of employment connected with it, the problem of leisure time--I will come to this later. But here I only want to say: don't forget