by Paul W. Taylor, Washington State Standard
September 14, 2025
This article was first published by TVW.
The timeline of Ed Lazowska’s life in computing doubles as a quick history of the field. From mainframes to PCs to the internet’s public debut in the 1990s and today’s artificial intelligence surge, Lazowska has been both witness and builder.
While he will continue to teach select courses as an emeritus professor at the University of Washington, Lazowsha recently retired and joined Inside Olympia host Austin Jenkins to take stock of a nearly 50-year career in computer science that coincided with the rise of the software industry and the state’s dominant role in it.
He joined the university’s computer science faculty in 1977 and became department chair in 1993. He was the first UW computer science and engineering faculty member elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the first fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the inaugural holder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair from 2000 to 2020.
In that role, he was a prime mover behind the infrastructure that let UW scale with Washington’s tech boom. He directed the fundraising campaign for the Paul G. Allen Center, which opened in 2003, and later did the same for the Bill & Melinda Gates Center, a $110 million building that opened in 2019 and doubled the school’s space. Those twin anchors — and the 2017 endowed name change to the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering — expanded degree production and deepened ties with a regional industry that now stretches “from Amazon to Zillow,” with “more than 7,000 engineers” each at Google and Meta in Seattle and Redmond. “We are also, by the way, the center of cloud computing,” he notes.
That outcome, he argues, was no accident. Washington has spent decades preparing for this moment. “We grew up alongside the industry,” Lazowska says.
Coupled with a track record in research, scholarship and teaching — and outsized advocacy for computing education and entrepreneurship — Lazowska helped turn a strong program into a civic engine that educates talent, anchors research and partners extensively with industry.
Lazowska’s public profile grew in parallel. In addition to roles at the national level, he became a familiar translator at home between campus, Olympia and industry. “I’m a hopeless left winger,” he says with a grin, “but we need to be reasonably pro-business in our cities and in our state,” because the tech sector “is responsible for a fair amount of the resources that allow us to achieve our dreams as a region.”
He views the industry’s cyclical nature with equanimity. After the dot-com bust, the Great Recession and recent post-pandemic layoffs at Microsoft, Oracle, F5 and other companies, his verdict is steady: “Every field has its ups and downs, and computer science has had ups and downs in employment.” The long-term trajectory, he argues, still points up, powered by compounding capability and the elasticity of software demand. The one constant is change — especially now, as artificial intelligence reshapes tools and workflows. “AI caught those of us in the field by surprise,” he says. Even so, he remains bullish: “I’m an optimist. I think that we need to look at applications of AI that are human augmentation rather than human replacement.”
Given the disruption, displacement and volatility, what drew him — and draws students now — to the discipline? Lazowska offers two answers. The narrow one: “All of us like rapid instant gratification. And when you write a computer program and it runs, there’s instant gratification … it’s an intellectual exercise. You’re solving a puzzle.” The broader one: “Computer science gives you the power to change the world … you don’t have physical constraints, only intellectual constraints.”
That worldview has informed how UW teaches in an AI-infused era. The school, he says, encourages facility with new tools while doubling down on fundamentals — problem solving, teamwork and ethics. Debugging, design and verification matter more than ever “because you’re going to have AI generating buggy programs.” And across the university, he argues, every student — not just future AI researchers — needs to be not just literate but fluent in how the technology works and where it fails.
For Seattle, the stakes are generational. The region’s transformation — from Boeing and Physio-Control to platforms, cloud and AI — has brought prosperity and growing pains. But Lazowska believes the path forward is clear: invest “top to bottom, from pre-K through graduate school,” so “our kids are the first-tier beneficiaries of the modern innovation economy we’re creating here.” As he moves into his emeritus role, he has a pragmatic charge to students, educators and policymakers alike: keep building, keep learning and make the machines work for people. If that doesn’t happen, he says, remember the maxim that once featured prominently on his Allen School homepage: “If you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”
This article was first published by TVW, Washington’s Public Affairs Network, providing unedited coverage of the state legislature and state government, on statewide cable TV and online at tvw.org. It also produces original interview shows, including Inside Olympia and The Impact. A media nonprofit, it exists to give Washingtonians access to their state government, increase civic access and engagement, and foster an informed citizenry.
Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: [email protected].