Progress

Originally published on Tumblr.

I just read an essay that pointed to two articles that argue that human progress is slowing down. I don’t see it. In fact, I see the exact opposite, and I think that just about everyone I know does too. The rate of progress seems to be steadily accelerating, so that progress itself is increasing at an exponential rate.

As regular readers of my posts know, I am constantly amazed and delighted by technology. I love the present, and I love where I see it going. As much as I keep up, and as much as I think about technology and progress, sometimes I forget how much progress is being made in my own field: software development.

I’ve just spent the weekend in Kansas City. My company, Clarify, was sponsoring a hackathon called Compute Midwest. Thirteen teams competed. Most of the resulting hacks were impressive. Two particularly stood out. One was called CatchKey, and the other AirBrush. What they accomplished in 24 hours I would have expected to take weeks.

CatchKey built a sophisticated HR application which completely automates the first round of technical interviews. It works like this:

• Using an administrative portal, HR personnel enter lists of questions and expected responses. More precisely, they input keywords that they’d expect to hear in a correct answer. They can also specify how many of those keywords need to appear in that candidate’s answer to give it a passing grade.

• A job applicant is given a number to call for an interview. The system reads the interviewee the questions and records the answers.

• When the interview is finished, the answers are automatically scored and the candidate is told whether or not to expect an followup interview.

• In the administrative portal, HR personnel can replay answers and optionally override the automated scoring.

This app was built using Twilio and Clarify’s APIs. It’s useful, and contains most of the features we’d expect to see in a production application.

The second application is even more sophisticated, although more of a prototype than a product.

AirBrush uses a computer vision to track a pen being moved around in space, ergo the application’s name. That movement is then used to “draw” on an electronic canvas visible via any web browser. Up to three people can work on the canvas together.

That would be impressive enough, but the team behind this app took it one step further. They built a companion Android application that uses voice commands to change the pen’s ink color and add stencils to the canvas.

A few years ago I would have expected something like this to come out of someone’s postgraduate work.

Today we have the tools to build applications like CatchKey and AirBrush in 24 hours.

By anyone’s definition, the ability to turn ideas like these into working software is progress, and it seems to me to be progress of a very fundamental kind. Tools are the reason we have developed so quickly as a species. Better tools can only mean quicker development.