Science & Tech Quote by Richard Dooling

“Fire-stealing” yanks us straight into the Prometheus myth, and Dooling uses it the way a novelist does: not as a compliment to human ingenuity, but as a diagnosis of our compulsion. Fire is technology in its first, oldest form - a stolen power that upgrades the species while quietly rewriting the terms of survival. The subtext is that invention isn’t merely what we do; it’s what we are, to the point that restraint reads as unnatural.

The line’s bite comes from its syntax: “we can’t help” is a moral shrug dressed up as anthropology. Dooling frames machine-building as instinct, then slides into “machine intelligences,” escalating from tools to entities that can contest us. That move matters. A hammer can’t humiliate you; an intelligence can. “Outsmart ourselves” captures a contemporary anxiety where the threat isn’t a singular evil machine but our own systems exceeding our ability to understand, govern, or even correctly incentivize them.

Then there’s the capital-D “Doom,” a deliberately pulpy note that signals self-awareness. He’s not predicting one specific apocalypse; he’s pointing at the recurring human pattern of building toward catastrophe with a craftsman’s pride. “Right up to the doorstep” is the final twist: we don’t necessarily kick the door down, but we keep renovating the entryway. In a culture that sells innovation as destiny and disruption as virtue, Dooling’s intent is corrective - a reminder that progress has a shadow, and that our greatest talent may be our inability to stop using it.