Technology Asylum

The other day I spent a couple of hours chatting to a Russian asylum seeker at the Asylum seekers drop-in/help centre.

An academic from Siberia, he has his hands on a couple of Russian technologies that he hopes to get funded here and to work on, if he is granted asylum.

One observation is that the centre would be a very interesting place to work at. Probably one of the most interesting.

A second is that the chances of finding a great and unknown Russian technology is pretty skinny these days. Maybe that first decade after the wall came down there might have been a few gems but now, less likely.

The third was, as I tried to explain through the telephone interpreter, Australia is the last place you’d seek asylum for a displaced technology. There’s simply no taste for risk investment here, especially into hardware technologies that the Russians seem so intent on developing.

I will do my best to help this fellow if he follows up. But only because of his situation. Any citizen that had approached me with these technologies would have got the usual advice. Nyet.

As a footnote, technologists in Australia would be well placed to flee and seek asylum elsewhere, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of membership of a particular social group and possessing certain progressive and bloody unpopular opinions. Also these guys are unable or, owing to such fear, unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of Club Australia for fear of being condemned to a life of servitude in a university, CSIRO or McDonalds.