- Neither is externalizing mental models or whatever.
It's not the human obligation to become more and more creative and resourceful, when less creative activities become less and less valuable, and fail to help earn a living.
The author of this article claims that people are missing the point. He's right. But he's missing the point as well, or at least arriving at a very wrong conclusion.
We're at a cusp of a very very strange era. This is the era where humans, and the capacity of human intellect, is approaching obsolescence. And the solution is not to train everyone to become like Einstein or, in this case, Knuth, or Steele, or Torvalds, or whatever.
"There can only be so many people in the entertainment industry" as Aubrey de Grey puts it.
Similarly, there can only be so many people in the "coding industry".
These people are missing a key property of coding: Coding eats itself! Or as Andreessen puts it "Software is eating the world". Meaning, coding by virtue of it happening, ends up automating aspects of itself, to the point where, a small kernel of information processing is able to carry out vast amounts of informational activity, as opposed to requiring a vast number of coders as those not familiar with coding tend to believe.
And this trend of automation will keep on increasing, giving rise to more and more serious technological unemployment, all the way to the logical conclusion of technological singularity. The sooner the "people in charge" realize this bitter truth, the better it would be for everyone.
You admit that computer and software are eating the world, but come to the conclusion that it's useless to teach people to speak to them at a basic level.
I'm not sure I follow your argument.
We don't teach literacy because we expect people to be professional writers, but rather, that because the written word is a basic means of communicating with each other and the world around them -- we're having this very discussion through the power of literacy, even.
In what way do you think people advocating teaching programming mean in any other sense?
When I advocate teaching programming to people, I don't envision a world full of software developers, I imagine a world full of slightly more informed software users. People who can interact with the Googles of the world by writing a sentence (or even a Boolean expression!) using correct logic or who can write a small Javascript snippet to automate a simple task like highlighting certain things on a webpage or who can write a simple Python script to get a rough approximation about how some numbers work.
Further, having even a tiny basis in computers - like the level of mathematics we teach in high school (on average) - gives me a basis as a professional to explain how things like Facebook work in a way that I can't now. It's much in a similar way to how once people know what a variable and a function is, I can explain more advanced math concepts using those ideas -- in a way that I couldn't if I had to start at the very beginning with "this is a number".
So again, I'm not sure I follow your argument: if software is eating the world, why wouldn't we teach people to speak basic software in addition to basic spoken language?
You seem to be coming from the opposing view of that of the article, that coding 'is' the new literacy. I was more challenging the article's claim that modeling is the new literacy, which I think isn't.
As to whether coding is the new literacy or not, I'd say we really need to ask what is the purpose of education. If the purpose of education is enlightenment, then yes, a child should learn how to code, but also how to paint, how to play a musical instrument, and so on and so forth. But then some children have the aptitude for one thing, some for another thing.
But I think the purpose of education as a means of making the individual economically viable is becoming more and more futile with increased automation. (In this regard I strongly adhere to the views expressed in the video 'Humans Need Not Apply' by CGPGrey[1], and TED talks by Jeremy Howard[2], Erik Brynjolfsson[3], Andrew McAfee[4]).
As to the need for coding so that humans could interact with machines, I think in the long run, this is also going to progress to the point where the machine would be aware of the abilities of the human it's dealing with and make it easy for the human to interact with itself. (EDIT 1: I should also add that interacting with machines is already happening at a massive scale when everyone has a smartphone in their back pocket. And yet when the software goes wrong, the inability of an average user to fix it is not the result of that user not being coding literate, but rather the insurmountable complexity of the code behind the easy-to-use interface, even if we ignore the hidden nature of proprietary codes).
> As to the need for coding so that humans could interact with machines, I think in the long run, this is also going to progress to the point where the machine would be aware of the abilities of the human it's dealing with and make it easy for the human to interact with itself.
And when is that long run going to play out, in the next 50, 100, 500 years? A lot of the learn to code movement is about economic empowerment, providing an avenue for economic advancement for children and adults, especially children and adults that wouldn't have thought coding as a career was possible for them or have had the access to resources to really pursue it.
Yes, automation is eliminating jobs, but still creating new and well paying technical ones. Whether and when we'll reach some technological singularity is all based on a lot of conjecture, and how that ultimately will pan out with how we structure our economy is impossible to predict. In the mean time we have the current reality, one that most likely will result in tech providing plenty of well paying jobs for at least a few more generations. The idea of coding as literacy, as has been stated before, isn't that everyone needs to become a software engineer. It's that as a person coming from any background you at least get the opportunity to see if it's a career you would want to pursue, and if not at least give you more insight into how technology works and make you a more well rounded citizen.
"modeling" is different.) If we think about oversimplified, or too abstract, disconnected form reality models and especially those probabilistic models, when they are trying to infer the next immediate outcome based on the probability distributions of from the past (which is completely wrong - all you could infer form probability distributions is what could happen on average), then, it is a total disaster. Look at these loses in finance and profound failures in humanities.
Models has to be "just right", like every molecular arrangement in the Nature.
But the skill of "extracting correct models from some aspects of reality" is really important.
- Neither is modeling.
- Neither is externalizing mental models or whatever.
It's not the human obligation to become more and more creative and resourceful, when less creative activities become less and less valuable, and fail to help earn a living.
The author of this article claims that people are missing the point. He's right. But he's missing the point as well, or at least arriving at a very wrong conclusion.
We're at a cusp of a very very strange era. This is the era where humans, and the capacity of human intellect, is approaching obsolescence. And the solution is not to train everyone to become like Einstein or, in this case, Knuth, or Steele, or Torvalds, or whatever.
"There can only be so many people in the entertainment industry" as Aubrey de Grey puts it.
Similarly, there can only be so many people in the "coding industry".
These people are missing a key property of coding: Coding eats itself! Or as Andreessen puts it "Software is eating the world". Meaning, coding by virtue of it happening, ends up automating aspects of itself, to the point where, a small kernel of information processing is able to carry out vast amounts of informational activity, as opposed to requiring a vast number of coders as those not familiar with coding tend to believe.
And this trend of automation will keep on increasing, giving rise to more and more serious technological unemployment, all the way to the logical conclusion of technological singularity. The sooner the "people in charge" realize this bitter truth, the better it would be for everyone.