Measure
Independent, repeated studies of everyday technologies and their lasting effects, including on people who never use them.
About
Making technology’s hidden consequences visible.
Highbeam is an independent research institute. We study what technologies do to people through repeated use and widespread adoption, and we bring that evidence to the public and to lawmakers.
What we do
A measurement institute for the technologies we live with.
Highbeam studies how advanced technologies reshape human behavior, relationships, economic opportunity and public life. We make benefits, harms and their distribution visible, so people and institutions can make informed choices about what to adopt, how to use it and what to change.
A technology can accomplish its immediate purpose while producing consequential changes through repeated use and widespread adoption. An assistant can answer a question well while changing how its user reasons afterward, how dependent they become, or how they treat another person. Whether those effects occur, persist, and help or harm is a question for evidence.
Explain
Public reports that tie the evidence to a real choice and say plainly what remains uncertain.
Advise
One-page policy briefs that give lawmakers a staircase of options, from a first step to the most ambitious.
Our founding question
What qualities of people and society do our technologies cultivate?
Our convictions inform the questions we ask. Our definitions, value judgments, methods and tradeoffs stay explicit and open to criticism, because an institute can be grounded in values and still let the evidence contradict its expectations.
How we work
Commitments made before the results come in.
Independence needs an operating basis, not just a promise. These are the rules we hold ourselves to.
Funders disclosed
Every funder and conflict is listed. Sponsors get no veto over findings, and we keep the right to publish.
Methods in the open
We publish our methods, corrections and null results, not just the headlines.
Values stated up front
We say what good we’re measuring for, and what it trades against, before we look at the data.
Specific about what we study
A product or feature, used for a particular purpose, by a specified population, over a defined period.
Lines we hold
What we won’t do.
- No universal moral scores for a company or a model.
- No describing short-term effects as changes in character.
- No sponsor veto over what we find or publish.
Get the evidence as it arrives.
New research and policy briefs from Highbeam, sent when they’re ready.