 On 20th March 1962, Aldous Huxley, author of the book Brave New World, published 30 years earlier in 1932, gave his speech at University College Berkeley about what he saw as elements of the book coming true in the modern technological world. 60 years after that speech, and the book's projection of the world's population being hypnotised to love their servitude continues to evolve. Well now, in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution, in the past we can say that all revolutions have essentially aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I mean, there's been the political revolution, the economic revolution, the religious revolution. All these aimed, as I say, not directly at the human being but at his surroundings. Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where a man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. This has generally been of a violent nature. But if you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent. Well, it seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this. That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy, who have always existed and presumably always will exist, to get people actually to love their servitude. This seems to me the ultimate in malevolent revolution, through we say. And this is a problem which has interested me for many years and about which I wrote Brave New World. Since then I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay that a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them 30 years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true. But if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they are living, the state of servitude, the state of being, having their differences ironed out and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this then you are likely to have a much more stable and much more lasting society, a much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps. But I think that in so far as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more concerned with a technically perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in Brave New World. This, as I say, is in this field of pure persuasion. I think we do know much more than we did in the past and obviously we now have mechanisms for multiplying the demagogues, voice and image in a quite hallucinatory way, the television and the radio. This alone, of course, creates an enormous gulf between the modern and the ancient demagogue and the ancient demagogue could only appeal to as many people as his voice could reach by the yelling of his utmost but the modern demagogue can touch literally millions at a time and of course with the multiplication of his image he can produce this kind of hallucinatory effect which is of enormous hypnotic and suggestive importance. I think this is peculiarly important because as one sees in looking back over history we have allowed in the past all those advances in technology which have profoundly changed a social and individual life. We have allowed them to take us by surprise. I mean it seems to me that during the late 18th century, early 19th century when the new machines were making possible the factory system it was not beyond the wit of man to see what was happening and to project into the future and maybe to forestall the really dreadful consequences which plagued England and most of Western Europe and most of this country. For about 50 or 60 years the horrible abuses of the factory system if a certain amount of forethought had been devoted to the problem at that time if people had first of all found out what was happening and then used their imagination to see what might happen and then had gone on to work out means by which the worst applications of the new techniques should not take place. Then I think Western humanity might have been spared about three generations of utter misery which was imposed upon the poor at that time and similarly with various technological advances now I mean quite clear we have to start thinking very very hard about the problems of automation and again I think we have to think still more profoundly about the problems which may arise in relation to these new techniques which may contribute to the ultimate revolution our business is to be aware of what is happening then to use our imagination to see what might happen how this might be abused and then if possible to see that the enormous powers which we now possess thanks to these scientific and technological advances shall be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their ultimate degradation.