Re: Australia: Refuge of enlightenment

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Feb 04 2002 - 20:47:12 MST


At 05:51 PM 2/3/02 -0500, Eliezer wrote:

>Amid all the gloom and doom, perhaps it is an opportune time to remember
>that in the real world, despite all the talk about relinquishment, what we
>are actually seeing is large sums of money being thrown into research.

I like to think that in the last five years, through books, reviews,
articles, talks, keynote addresses, radio and TV interviews and programs, I
have made a small, but perhaps not insignificant, impact on the memetic
climate here in Oz, in particular with regard to policy attitudes toward
nanotechnology and a general awareness of the accelerating curve of change.
When I started out, these ideas were regarded as preposterous, denounced as
laughable, yawned over; now they're almost mainstream, at least among
younger people. If I'm right, this indicates that getting out there on the
stump is worth doing.

Of course it's not at all irrelevant that amazing cutting-edge work in
nanotechnology is being done here by people like Dr Vijoleta
Braach-Maksvytis at the CSIRO.

Damien Broderick



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