SDS 452: The Staggering Pace of Progress

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Our minds habituate remarkably quickly to new technologies, and so we easily lose perspective on the magic that is enveloping us, lengthening our lifespans, and markedly improving quality of life around the globe. Humanity is in the midst of an ongoing, dramatic revolution enabled by data and automation, and absolutely every industry is being impacted. 

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Personally, over the past six years, as a result of my being the chief data scientist at a company that designs and deploys natural-language models in the human-resources industry, I’ve witnessed first hand — even played a role in — transforming the recruitment industry in particular with data and automation.

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To help restore our perspective on the astounding progress that society has made within a few short decades, as well as how it’s accelerating dramatically, I’ll focus on the recruitment industry, which — perhaps surprisingly at first glance — has played a critical role throughout history in the development and application of transformative technology.

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The recruitment profession has existed for at least thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians and the classical Greek and Roman cultures employed recruiters to find soldiers for military service.

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The modern recruitment industry was also seeded by conflict, though from the opposite side of the coin. During the Second World War, employment agencies boomed in the West to staff the workplaces left vacant by those conscripted to take up arms. Upon the surrender of Axis forces in the 1940s, servicepeople returned to their home nations. Recruiters were again inundated with opportunity, this time to fill public and private sector roles with veterans, many of whom – thanks to the technology boom powered by vast public R&D investment during the war – were equipped with novel and valuable skills, e.g., in plastics, computing, aerospace, and energy.

(02:28):
Let’s now talk about tools and technologies specifically. Ancient civilizations invented numbers and, later, even writing systems to track resources, including to conduct censuses and recruit a sensible quota of soldiers from a given territory. By the twentieth century, recruitment efforts during and after the Second World War involved advertisements in newspapers, bulletin boards, and personally canvassing in high-traffic public spaces like train stations. Applications could be made by mail, while Rolodexes stored contact details and business cards. Simultaneously, typewriters were used to track recruitment and employment records on paper in vast storehouses.

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By the latter half of the twentieth century, the pace of technological progress accelerated from a centuries-long pace to a decades-long pace, in which entire ways of working were displaced inside a single generation. The wide dissemination of telephones first enabled candidate sourcing and interviews to proceed more rapidly than by travel or mail. By the 1990s, mainframe computers permitted employment records to be stored in a more compact digital format relative to paper, and Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software emerged for storing candidate information. Meanwhile, household desktop computers and the Internet enabled early adopters to seek candidates and job openings on company websites, online job boards, and via targeted digital advertisements. Recruiters, clients, and candidates began to interact via electronic mail (e-mail) alongside traditional mail, phone calls, and in-person meetings.

(04:16):
Since the dawn of the 21st century, the digital technologies of the 1990s have spread from early adopters to the majority of working-age inhabitants of developed nations and to much of the rest of the planet. This spread sparked the dawn of an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution that today is in its infancy, but promises an even more dramatic acceleration in technological capability.

(04:43):
In next week’s Five-Minute-Friday, we’ll pick up where we’re leaving off here and examine the impact exponential technologies like AI, machine learning, and deep learning have in the present day. In the future, we’ll also explore how these technologies will further evolve recruitment services in the coming decades, thereby reshaping all aspects of life — much as the industry has done for thousands of years.

(05:06):
As we covered in this episode, that was first at a pace unrecognizable in a single person’s lifespan, you wouldn’t even notice technology changing. Then, in the 20th century, entirely within a single lifetime, you would notice all of the technologies we use being overhauled. And, going forward, data and automation will result in massive changes to nearly all aspects of life several times over within a single generation. 

(05:33):
All right, that’s our plan! In next week’s Five-Minute-Friday, we’ll continue our coverage of the staggering pace of technological change.