Science Quote by Isaac Asimov

Asimov’s line lands like a contrarian shrug aimed at the Luddite panic that flares up whenever a new machine arrives. He doesn’t bother arguing that computers are harmless; he sidesteps the premise. The real danger, he suggests, isn’t the tool but the uneven distribution of the tool - who gets to compute, model, store, predict, and who gets left squinting at the world with analog instruments while decisions harden around them.

The subtext is political as much as technological. “I fear the lack of them” reads as a warning about power: societies without broad access to computation risk becoming intellectually and economically outgunned, dependent on other nations, corporations, or bureaucracies that do have it. It’s also a jab at nostalgia-as-policy. The anxiety he’s mocking isn’t really about silicon; it’s about control, about fearing that machines will replace human judgment. Asimov flips that fear into something more pragmatic: without computers, human judgment gets replaced by ignorance, paperwork, and slow-moving institutions that can’t see patterns until it’s too late.

Context matters. Asimov came up in the mid-century moment when “computer” moved from room-sized military apparatus to the beginnings of civilian infrastructure. He’d watched science turn into big science - data-heavy, collaborative, mechanized. For a scientist, refusing computers isn’t purity; it’s self-sabotage. The quote works because it’s crisp and asymmetrical: one short sentence rejects the fashionable dread, the next sentence names the quieter catastrophe - being locked out of the future by choice, by poverty, or by policy.