Albert Einstein said technology would one day “surpass our human interaction” and create “a generation of idiots”.
There’s no record of him ever saying this. The first iterations of this quote appear to have been posted online in 2012.
A post on Facebook, shared hundreds of times, attributes a quote stating “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots” to Albert Einstein.
There is no evidence that he ever said this. According to Quote Investigator—a site that sources quotes circulating online—the earliest versions of this post appeared online in 2012.
In an article about the same quote, US fact checking service PolitiFact found no record of this quote in a definitive collection of the scientist's words.
Both PolitiFact and fellow fact checking service Snopes have pointed out that a quote bearing some resemblance to the Facebook post appears in the 1995 film Powder, with a character played by Jeff Goldblum saying: "It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity."
Another character, played by Sean Patrick Flanery, responds "Albert Einstein."
Posts in which quotes are misattributed to public figures are relatively common on social media, and often reach very large audiences. We have recently checked quotes misattributed to Sir David Attenborough and Boris Johnson.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there is no proof Albert Einstein ever actually said this.
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