"Under Medicare right now, I get paid to put a pacemaker in you, but I don't get paid to counsel you about end-of-life care." -- Richard Dooling
Richard Patrick Dooling (born 1954) is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his novel White Man's Grave, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for Fiction, and for co-producing and co-writing the 2004 ABC miniseries Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital.
Dooling's first novel, Critical Care (1992), was made into a 1997 movie of the same title, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring James Spader and Kyra Sedgwick. His next three novels...White Man's Grave (1994), Brain Storm (1998), and Bet Your Life (2002)...were all New York Times Notable Books. In conjunction with Kingdom Hospital, he also wrote The Journals of Eleanor Druse (2004), writing as Eleanor Druse, a character in the miniseries. Dooling's short story "Bush Pigs" was read as part of Selected Shorts, a program produced by Symphony Space in New York and aired on NPR. The performance was later included on the CD Getting There from Here, a compilation of listeners' favorites from the program.
His nonfiction book Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech, and Sexual Harassment (1996) is an examination of the social and legal implications of profane speech. In Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ (2008) he explores the implications of machine intelligence overtaking human intelligence. He has also written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The National Law Journal.
Dooling was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and is a graduate of Saint Louis University (1976) and Saint Louis University School of Law (1987). He has been a practicing attorney and developer of web-based legal tools for the St. Louis firm Bryan Cave. As of 2010, Dooling is a visiting professor at the University of Nebraska College of Law.
"And it was back in the mid-1980s, and as I point out in a piece, that was when we are spending about eight percent of our gross domestic product on health care. And even then, we had the impression that so much of the excessive, aggressive medical treatment that took place at the end of life was not only unnecessary but it was cruel.""At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers' apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.""Let's take care of mothers and infants first, and then let's see what's left over for everybody over 50. I'm over 50. If I get sick, I would rather have money spent on children before it's spent on me.""Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can't help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom.""Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.""Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us."