The codeless computers of the future and the fall of the programming elite

Programming is one of todays most in demand skills but as we continue to train, not code our latest computer systems, the trend won't last Before the invention of the computer, most experimental psychologists thought the brain was an unknowable black box that they'd never be able to unravel – let alone understand. You could analyze a subject's behaviour but thoughts, memories, emotions? That stuff was obscure and inscrutable, beyond the reach of science. So these behaviorists, as they called themselves, confined their work to the study of stimulus and response, feedback and reinforcement. They gave up trying to understand the inner workings of the mind and this doctrine ruled the field for four decades. MIT breakthrough lets virtual reality gamers cut the chord Then, in the mid 1950s, a group of rebellious psychologists, linguists, information theorists, and early artificial intelligence (AI) researchers came up with a different conception of the mind. People, they argued, were not just collections of responses that had been conditioned over millions of years, they absorbed information, processed it, and then acted upon it. They had systems for writing, storing, and recalling memories. They operated via a logical, formal syntax. It was more like a computer. The so called cognitive revolution started small, but as computers became standard equipment in psychology labs across the country, it gained broader acceptance. By the late 1970s, cognitive psychology had overthrown behaviorism, and with the new regime came a whole new language for talking about the brain. Psychologists began describing thoughts as programs, ordinary people talked about storing facts away in their memory banks, and business gurus fretted about the limits of mental bandwidth and processing power in the modern workplace.