Science & Tech Quote by Richard Dooling

The line lands like a cold hand on the spine: not fear of machines, but fear of our own lag. Dooling’s “yet now” implies a before-and-after, a hinge moment where optimism about innovation curdles into dread. The phrase “sickening suspicion” is doing more than signaling anxiety; it dramatizes a particular modern kind of nausea, the queasy sense that we’ve misplaced the steering wheel and only just noticed.

“Technology has run ahead of us” is a deceptively simple metaphor. It frames progress not as a tool we wield but as a runner who’s broken from the pack, indifferent to whether the rest can keep up. The subtext is moral and civic, not merely technical: we can build faster than we can govern, market faster than we can regulate, share faster than we can understand consequences. That “us” is collective and accusatory. It pulls readers into complicity, refusing the comforting idea that the problem is “them” (engineers, Silicon Valley, faceless corporations). It’s all of us, dazzled by convenience, numbed by speed.

As a novelist, Dooling’s intent isn’t to publish a policy brief; it’s to seed narrative tension. Suspicion suggests incomplete evidence, a hunch that something’s off, which is exactly how technological disruption often arrives in daily life: first as a new feature, then as a new norm, then as a new dependency. The quote works because it captures the cultural moment when progress stops feeling like a promise and starts feeling like a chase.