Cutting edges

As a professional software engineer, I spent hours and hours each week mentally cycling through all the profanities I know. If you’ve spent enough time around software engineers in the last couple years, you can probably guess that means I use Xcode to write programs for the great love of my life, the Macintosh.

I spend thousands of dollars each year upgrading to the very latest and greatest Apple hardware, buying computing tools that promise to accelerate the pace of progress as I go about pursuit of my life’s work. Computers on the cutting-edge running software for making software that’s so poorly made that I’m left idly whiling my days away, fantasizing about swiftly cutting my career in software short, my mind wandering backwards in time because things certainly couldn’t have always been this bad.

This week while waiting out yet another Xcode soft freeze, day-dreaming about cutting short my life on technology’s cutting-edge, I found myself taking inventory of the multitude of tools humans have for cutting. Some light web searching turned up facts that blew my mind: the very first tools ever made were for cutting, they were made 1.5 million years ago by evolutionary ancestors I’d honestly forgotten all about the existence of, my own time in school being something of a figment of history itself, too.

Over tens of thousands of years, the story of human progress is a story about tools that cut. Today we control forest overgrowth with 40 foot tall aerial saw systems that hang from helicopters and we sculpt imperfect corneas with 2000-pound lasers that precisely cut to the depth of 1/400th of the width of a human hair.

There’s a sturdy German chef’s knife in a block on my kitchen counter, my bathroom cabinet has a bunch of cartridge razors made in New England, and somewhere in my desk drawers is the letter opener my mom gave me for Christmas years ago from a silversmith in my hometown. Each tool represents centuries of refinement, both perfectly adapted to its specific purpose and unthinkably useless for any of the tasks its peers adeptly handle.

Last year in my life, no object generated the frequency and intensity of claims of life changing quality to rival those new Japanese safety box cutting knives. They’re a marvel. They both slice through cardboard like butter and keep skin safe like butterknives. The story of human progress continues to cut new paths forward.

Fortunate though we inarguably are to live with the inheritance of more than a million years of folks working to make cutting tools better, this story of the continuing march of human progress is one that’s frustratingly confined to the physical environment.

And as someone whose life’s work is undertaken entirely in digital environments, I’m personally exhausted by the frustratingly glacial pace of computing progress. It’s not just that not much has changed in the last 40 years since the introduction of the Macintosh, but it’s also that you and I were born within a century of the development of the personal computer, a technology that’s at once the cutting edge and roughly a million years behind in terms of innovations on the cutting edge.

Think about it: we started with command lines, typing our way through digital space. Then came the mouse era, where we pushed plastic pucks across desks. Now we're mostly poking at phones and dragging fingers across trackpads. As I write this on my MacBook, I'm struck by how every action requires precise manipulation of a single-pixel pointer—it's like using a LASIK laser to sometimes sculpt a cornea but mostly to butter toast and occasionally to chop down a tree.

The most meaningful work being done by the most creative people alive today is happening on Macs where everything happens with the precision of a laser. The very best things our species pursues are getting made by people interminably burdened by the cognitive load of maintaining pixel-perfect accuracy everywhere and all the time in the digital environment.

Enter the inescapable reality of the Engineering Triangle of Constraints: good, fast, cheap. For the last 40 years we’ve navigated the digital environment of our Macs with the good mouse cursor, giving every one of us the precision of a surgical instrument for every task we undertake whether we like it or not.

I’m left wondering about the other edges. What if we had digital tools that optimized for fast or cheap? If the mouse is a laser, what does a circular saw or a disposable razor for computing look like?

Like our toolmaking ancestors who first shaped stone into cutting edges, we're just at the beginning of our journey to shape our digital environment.

I’m so excited to see the cutting edge of tools evolve in digital environments.