Science & Tech Quote by Isaac Asimov

Asimov’s line lands like a progress report written by a disappointed futurist: we’re winning the information race and losing the judgment race. Coming from a scientist who also spent his life narrating science to the public, it’s not anti-science pessimism so much as a warning about asymmetry. Knowledge scales. Wisdom, stubbornly, doesn’t.

The craft here is in the contrast between “gathers” and “gathers.” Both verbs sound orderly, almost bureaucratic, as if society and science are running parallel institutions. But only one of them has reliable incentives and feedback loops. Science has methods that reward correction: peer review, replication, the brutal elegance of being wrong in public. Society has politics, markets, and identity, all of which can monetize error and sanctify it as loyalty. Asimov’s subtext is that we keep building higher-powered tools while leaving the user manual blank.

The timing matters. Writing in the long shadow of the atomic age and the Cold War, Asimov had lived through the moment when scientific breakthroughs stopped being merely impressive and started being existential. The quote reads as an ethics problem disguised as a lament: when knowledge outpaces wisdom, the gap doesn’t stay theoretical. It becomes policy, weaponry, environmental damage, medical mistrust, algorithmic governance.

He’s also needling a modern complacency: we treat “more data” as a moral good. Asimov argues the opposite. Without the slower virtues - restraint, historical memory, empathy, institutions that can absorb complexity - knowledge becomes acceleration without steering.