A more apt analogy would be "for everyday users who just want to record their expenses, keep a journal, and sketch some drawings, paper and pencil have been perfectly fine for the last century".
Understanding how computers work down to being able to describe L1 instruction caches and how prefetching works and why having an 8 instruction wide decoder pulling from a giant L1I cache isn't really relevant to empowering people. Most people are going to be more empowered by using computers more efficiently to prepare documents and presentations to assist their other endeavors. I think those people can be forgiven for not getting excited that now they have "8 cores" or "16 cores" or "32 cores". Conversely, getting drastically improved battery life is an immediate and tangible improvement in the day-to-day lives of people.
Being illiterate creates a societal gap because it prevents the free spread of information, and creates a class hierarchy centered around controlling the spread of information. How does not understanding how computers work limit people?
> "how much of a divide there now is"
You seem to be insinuating that, used to, people were "more literate" and are becoming more ignorant. What if it's just that computers have become easier to use and more prevalent?
More people are using computers to communicate now than ever before. This seems to be the opposite of "peasants not knowing how to write". People have more opportunity to reach out and grow.
There are problems in controlling information and infrastructure, who owns all our data, and who controls social media along with privacy concerns, and maybe one of the solutions to these problems is more tech education, but this seems orthogonal to your concerns.
>You seem to be insinuating that, used to, people were "more literate" and are becoming more ignorant.
No, I'm saying the goalposts moved - a lot. The same way widespread reading and writing moved the goalposts back in the day.
>How does not understanding how computers work limit people?
It puts them in the class that considers computers to be magic, like not knowing how to read and write put people in a class that considered industrial machinery and accounting to be magic.
In a world where computers do all the high paid jobs..... thats as low a class as being generally illiterate.
To put it really simply
"computer illiterate"
Is now a thing.
Actual written definition being: not able to use computers well, or not understanding basic things about computers
Similarly to how literal literacy enables access to information, Computer Programming literacy could enable people to derive more value from open software, for example. It could enable people to automate some tasks, or make some tasks easier (eg. gathering + summarizing information, which can enable someone to make better predictions/decisions).
If I want to know what happened today, I can read the newspaper. If I want to know what happened on Nov 25, every year, I could write a quick script fetching this information from some source and look at that list showing Nov 25 (although yes, Wikipedia provides some of that info).
Computer Literacy provides tools to interact with information.
If this was 1990 I would agree with you.
Its not 1990, and computers do a lot more than edit documents, watch netflix and browse the web, if thats where someones knowledge of computing ends they dont have an understanding of the basics and are by definition computer illiterate, modern day equivalent of signing their name with a palm print.
Understanding how computers work down to being able to describe L1 instruction caches and how prefetching works and why having an 8 instruction wide decoder pulling from a giant L1I cache isn't really relevant to empowering people. Most people are going to be more empowered by using computers more efficiently to prepare documents and presentations to assist their other endeavors. I think those people can be forgiven for not getting excited that now they have "8 cores" or "16 cores" or "32 cores". Conversely, getting drastically improved battery life is an immediate and tangible improvement in the day-to-day lives of people.
Being illiterate creates a societal gap because it prevents the free spread of information, and creates a class hierarchy centered around controlling the spread of information. How does not understanding how computers work limit people?
You seem to be insinuating that, used to, people were "more literate" and are becoming more ignorant. What if it's just that computers have become easier to use and more prevalent?More people are using computers to communicate now than ever before. This seems to be the opposite of "peasants not knowing how to write". People have more opportunity to reach out and grow.
There are problems in controlling information and infrastructure, who owns all our data, and who controls social media along with privacy concerns, and maybe one of the solutions to these problems is more tech education, but this seems orthogonal to your concerns.