The below is a summary of my recent article why knowledge outruns wisdom.
In 1988, the science fiction legend Isaac Asimov warned that “science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” At the time, the internet was still an academic experiment, AI belonged to labs, and the smartphone was science fiction. His words sounded prophetic, but distant.
Today, they read like breaking news. Knowledge doesn’t merely sprint, it sprints exponentially. Every headline, every feed refresh, every AI model release expands the canyon between what we know and what we understand. We scroll endlessly, but meaning slips further from our grasp. The danger is no longer ignorance. It is drowning in information without the lifeboat of wisdom.
I have spent the past decade standing at that fault line, between technology’s promise and humanity’s capacity to absorb it. I’ve learned one truth: we don’t suffer from scarcity of knowledge, we suffer from scarcity of frameworks. AI can generate a thousand reports before breakfast, but without perspective, they are as useful as a compass spinning wildly north.
That is why I created scaffolds for leaders and citizens alike. Keynotes that weave slime mold into management lessons or a robot into a moral compass. A book, Now What? How to Ride the Tsunami of Change, that equips readers with WAVE-Watch, Adapt, Verify, Empower-a rhythm for navigating the storm without losing integrity. And Futurwise, a daily practice of turning signals into clarity, so insight is no longer lost in the noise.
This is not about being “future-ready.” It is about becoming future-literate. To read change as fluently as we read words. To balance velocity with values, and scale with sense.
If Asimov was right, and I believe he was, then our task is both simple and impossible: to close the widening gap between knowledge and wisdom before it closes on us. We cannot let technology run ahead without a compass, because when it does, it is our children who pay the highest price.
The most important metric of progress is not speed, nor scale, but whether it expands dignity, safety, and human agency. And yet, time and again, we see the opposite: tools designed without foresight, platforms optimized for addiction instead of flourishing, and corporate decisions made with profit as the lodestar rather than principle. It should unsettle us that an internal playbook can exist where children are treated as collateral damage of innovation. That is not foresight. That is moral failure dressed as progress.
The question, then, is not whether progress is inevitable. It is whether we will anchor it in principles strong enough to protect those with the least power. Progress without principles is not progress at all – it is regression in disguise.
So I’ll leave you with this: What is the line you refuse to cross, before someone else redraws it for you? And how will you help ensure we never hand our children a world where wisdom always trails behind knowledge?
To read the full article, please proceed to TheDigitalSpeaker.com