A Thinking Machine -metaphors for mind

A big chunk of late 20th century thinking about thinking/brains/minds was dominated by computational metaphors, and my informal recollection would say that this accelerated in the 80s as people increasingly had their own computers at home. So I was very interest to see this article about language which draws attention to the way that computational metaphor has influenced and been used in thinking about language: A Thinking Machine: On metaphors for mind | Child's Play here's how it works: "the mind is like a spreadsheet: a prefabricated architecture that follows a strict, rule-based program, that rigidly structures its inputs and outputs in just such a way."
So what's the alternative? Well, there have been some more serious attempts to dethrone this metaphor:

By this suggestion, when we hear or read language, the computational principles of this innate grammar conduct a series of logical operations, which parse the incoming stream according to its component parts, and so yield understanding.
But what if this is simply the wrong metaphor?

What if – say – language is more like a search engine? ....
A search engine is a probabilistic, predictive learning machine. Unlike spreadsheets, search engines do not engage with their input in a determinate, preprogrammed manner. Instead of rigidly structuring incoming information according to some prefabricated set of rules, they discover structure within information. ...
This metaphor gives rise to a fundamentally different view of language: one in which language acquisition relies on relatively simple – yet powerful – learning mechanisms, and in which language comprehension and production is fundamentally predictive, rather than determinate.