Algorithm, according to wikipedia is, "In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm (/ˈælɡərɪðəm/ AL-gə-ri-dhəm) is a self-contained sequence of actions to be performed. Algorithms can perform calculation, data processing and automated reasoning tasks."
Good thing computers are made to be user friendly or we'd be goners. ;-)
The Millenials grew up with computers from kindergarten on. It's like a second language to them.
There's a commercial out now for Watson, AI analytic talking computer to help us with our daily tasks. That seems like a "brave new world" to me. We're being outsourced by computers.
A lot of people are picking up coding to help with their everyday jobs. GitHub alone counts 20 million users. Many of these aren't professional programmers. But with numbers like that, I think maybe you're right.
Just FYI, I'm putting this thread into my database so that I can predict all of your future actions -- not that hard when you have a statistically valid (large enough) sample of all your posts.
Surprisingly they predicted the outcome of the last presidential election over and beyond what the news media was trumpeting (no pun intended,) based on algorithms and stats.
Let's be honest. Although 538 predicted that Hillary would win, it also maintained that the margin of error was huge and that the outcome was very uncertain.
Given that Hillary won the popular vote, and Trump won the electoral college by barely squeaking by in a couple of states, the results were well within what was statistically predicted. Anyone who is bragging about predicting Trump just happened to be on the winning side of a risky bet.
Statistical prediction and machine learning are useful tools, but can't do any better than the data they are fed. This past election was a very weird one and was subject to a lot of foreign interference. It should be taken as more a cautionary tale than as an example of business as usual.