Changing Focus

It is the end of an era for me and for Teb’s Lab. After nearly a decade of developing curriculum and running classes, I have decided to change my career to focus on public policy. Numerous factors are driving me in this direction. I’ll spare you most of the navel-gazing details and instead just say, thank you.

To everyone who took a class or shared our content with a friend. To all of you who wrote in with feedback or opened an issue on our curricula repos. And to all of you who simply took the time to read this newsletter despite our erratic publishing schedule in recent years. You have made this journey worthwhile. Truly, from the bottom of my heart, thank you all.

While our consulting page will soon go dark, our curriculum will remain available, free, and open source on Github. As always, this email address remains open to queries from former students. I will never grow tired of answering your questions and encouraging your curiosity.

As I begin my hunt for a job in the policy sector, I will be using this newsletter to publish analysis and opinions related to the intersection of public policy and computing technology, with an initial focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Which, in many ways, won’t be a big change for the Lab Report. I have always tried to imbue my students and readers with the belief that they should think and care deeply about the impact of the technology they work on and strive to use their talents in ways that support their values. This transition is partly about living up to that ideal myself.

In 2018, at the peak of the “everyone should learn to code” zeitgeist, I wrote a piece titled Technologists Should Abandon Their Craft in which I argued that despite all the incentives bringing people into programming and other technology fields, we actually needed more people willing to break out of it. In particular, I had decided that:

The piece was well received. Some commenters pointed out (and I agree) that computer technology can, and has, positively transformed many lives. But the problems I was most concerned about — the often careless and paternalistic push to embed software in every aspect of our lives, the systemic risks from the widespread and unregulated adoption of machine learning technologies, and the extreme concentration of corporate power — have mostly continued at full steam.

For technology to do more good than harm, society needs well-informed and well-meaning people to act as a counterbalance to the technology industry’s relentless drive towards power and profit. I am not deluded enough to believe I can simply stop that train, but I am crazy enough to try.

Here’s to the next adventure.