One of the most enigmatic figures in the tech industry is the late Steve Jobs, Apple‘s co-founder and visionary CEO, who oversaw the company’s massive rise to prominence between the late 1970s and the early 2010s.
“Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think. So I view computer science as a liberal art. It should be something that everybody learns.”
Tomorrow’s skills
Steve Jobs had been at the helm of Apple for nearly two decades when technology journalist Robert X Cringely interviewed the CEO for a PBS documentary series called Triumph of the Nerds.
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During this interview, later released in 2012 as a standalone documentary, Jobs highlighted the importance of programming as a way to enhance cognition.
Jobs strongly believed in a link between understanding the process of programming and understanding how your mind can work best. In that spirit, programming doesn’t need to result in something useful or productive; it can serve to help you improve your thought processes and sharpen the way you can understand the wider world.
Yesterday’s monotony
Jobs laid out this thinking in 1995 when there was a relative drop in the number of computer science students, according to data from Stanford, and it wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that the student count accelerated once again.
In recent years, there’s been a huge push by policymakers to get more and more people involved in computer science and programming, with college degrees as well as diplomas, and online courses, all geared to equip people of all ages with technical skills.
But recent times have also given rise to AI tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, which have started to automate much of the day-to-day programming work that once required hours of time and attention. Jobs saw programming as a means not to achieve a goal but a way to refine and augment the human mind. With automations and AI-powered coding increasingly prevalent, the industry feels like it’s slipping ever further from this philosophy.
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