Science & Tech Quote by David Bohm

Bohm isn’t marveling at gadgets; he’s staging a quiet indictment of human maturity. The line “one begins to wonder” reads like understatement, but it’s doing heavy lifting: a scientist, trained to speak in measured claims, admits to existential doubt. That restraint is the point. It suggests we’ve reached a threshold where technical competence no longer feels like progress, just acceleration.

The subtext is that “technology” is not a neutral external force. Bohm frames it as power that “keeps on advancing,” almost like a runaway process with its own momentum. The human race, by contrast, is the fragile variable in the equation. His worry isn’t simply that tools can be used for good or ill; it’s that the gap between what we can do and what we can responsibly choose is widening. “Greater and greater power” implies asymmetry: the cost of a mistake scales faster than our capacity to prevent one.

Context sharpens the stakes. Bohm lived through the era when physics stopped being purely explanatory and became world-shaping: nuclear weapons, Cold War brinkmanship, and the normalization of planetary risk as a policy tool. A theoretical physicist who also probed consciousness and dialogue, he’s hinting that the crisis is cognitive and social, not merely technical. The sentence’s binary - “good or… destruction” - isn’t melodrama; it’s a sober recognition that modern invention increasingly operates on a civilizational slider. The real question lurking beneath his calm phrasing: can our ethics, institutions, and attention span evolve at anything like the speed of our machines?