Science & Tech Quote by Isaac Asimov

Asimov’s sting is in the inversion: we’re trained to treat “honesty” as a virtue, so calling it inhuman sounds like a category error. It isn’t. He’s pointing at a uniquely modern discomfort: machines don’t lie, but they also don’t cushion. A computer that’s “competently programmed and working smoothly” doesn’t improvise mercy, doesn’t soften a verdict, doesn’t pretend a bad outcome is “complicated.” It outputs the truth it was built to output, at full volume.

The key word is “once.” Early computers were famously fallible, full of glitches you could blame and bargain with. Asimov is interested in the moment after the bugs are gone, when reliability becomes its own menace. Human dishonesty often functions as social lubricant: white lies, strategic ambiguity, the gentle fiction that buys time for pride or grief. A perfectly functioning system strips away that choreography. It doesn’t read the room, doesn’t honor face-saving rituals, doesn’t care if the user needed reassurance more than accuracy.

Subtextually, Asimov is warning that objectivity can be weaponized precisely because it appears neutral. If the program is “honest,” then the moral responsibility migrates upstream to the programmer, the institution, the data. The machine becomes an alibi: don’t blame us, blame the output. Written by a scientist who built his career imagining robot ethics, the line anticipates today’s algorithmic age: the cold comfort of “the model is just telling the truth,” even when the truth has been engineered, narrowed, or made brutally uninterpretable.