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

Didn't used to be. Wonder when it was added https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/computer...

edit:March 2008 https://public.oed.com/updates/new-words-list-march-2008/

Most people can use computers just fine which, by definition, is enough for them to be computer literate. Where's the problem?

How much do you need to know about how your car works to benefit from driving it?

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.

It's far less sad, (and perhaps hopeful?) if you think of it more as there now being more diversity of use cases.

Most consumer personal computers used to have relatively similar power as well as use cases; your Apple II, your neighbors Apple II, and Apple IIs at corporate offices would not have differed as much as personal computers do these days.

These days, there are large differences across segments - anything from school children using chromebooks to enthusiasts running homelab servers.

Not just a gradient of computing power, but also use cases: home archivists with a lot of storage; gamers with beefy graphics cards; media creators with expensive monitors; chrome tab hoarders always downloading more RAM...

I don't think it's that we treat school children using chromebooks as peasants, and treat enthusiasts like kings. We are rather now able to cater well to various segments, and this variety of product offerings to consumers is a good thing.

I think the article's general assertion that the computing advances in question have more to contribute to certain uses cases more than others is more than fair.

Modern life is just complicated: there's so much things to know. Computers are just a small part of it.

As an example, I'm (mostly) car illiterate, I just don't have the time and energy to commit to something that do what I want and works 99.99% of the time.

> For everyday users who just want to take the kids to school, get to work and head out of town on the weekend, vehicles have been “perfectly fine” for the last decade.

Nobody needs to know (or cares) how a car works - EXCEPT professionals and enthusiasts.

> For everyday users who just want to take some holiday snaps, record their kids making a mess and maybe print a few small pics, point n shoot cameras have been “perfectly fine” for the last decade.

Nobody needs to know (or cares) how a SLR works or all of it's features - EXCEPT professionals and enthusiasts.

We can go on and on with this. I don't think it says anything about a divide, it says that our world is so sophisticated and complicated there are entire devices and areas of society that most of us use on a daily basis, but for which we have no care about how it works. That's perfectly fine.

This is very vague. What exactly do you mean by "computer illiterate" - do you mean someone who isn't a power user, or someone who can't program?

people whose knowledge of computers stops at "browse the web, stream some Netflix, maybe edit some documents"

Is the new "peoples whose knowledge of reading and writing stops at being able to sign their name".

do you know how your car/microwave/dishwasher/TV works, to the detail of the engine, the type of tires, and would you be able to repair/exchange/hack parts of it? I don't, and I really don't see the point of knowing to be able to do so, as my hobbies/curiosity lies somewhere else -- for some, computers are just another household appliance (and a particularly complex one)

I, as Im sure applies to you, know what they are and the differences between them.

Which is more than can be said of people who dont know or understand their M1s from their Celerons.

IMO more of an indictment of the tower of babel in software development. Outside of games, we all basically do those things: browser, email, text, spreadsheet, word process.

Those things were reasonably well solved almost two orders of magnitude ago.

Software never bothered to optimize for snappiness, despite so many opportunities. So we got stuck with the same kinda-good response, and for mobile, a much more questionable kinda-ok battery life of 3-6 hours.

I mean, on a couple of node shrinks where the efficiency improved (because clock speed wasn't), could we have please attacked the battery life?

It takes an architecture change to highlight how inefficient desktop is. Unfortunately, desktop is an afterthought in terms of investment. The best hope for actual optimization is convergence with the phone OSs, which this is the first step of.

It is also wrong, computers from the last decade are not 'perfectly fine' for 'browsing'. I just saw my girlfriend do her website with Wix on her old macbook air and the performance was so slow that I wondered how she could tolerate it. Those new processors will benefit everyone.

The divide has always been there, it's just that "computer illiterate" people massively outnumber the literate ones and as such, are getting more attention.

It's kind of like saying there's a huge divide between "house literate" people, who know how everything in their home is built and how to fix it, and "house illiterate" people who just want to come home, turn on the lights, use the shower, the oven and the bed.

Brazilian Favelas spring to mind.

Yeah, like that.

Did you mean that in a negative way? The way I see it, favelas are more of a government problem, not enforcing rules and standards leads to people making up their own (just like Internet standards).

Going with my analogy, someone who built their own house in the favelas is, in fact, "house literate". Their home might be sub-standard, but they can take care of it all on their own.

"housing illiteracy" was your example not mine. I was just suggesting a possible parallel with how great the divide is now compared with the days when the vast majority of the world was lucky to lay their hands on a Z80.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. It seems we're agreeing on there being a divide, except I think the current situation is just a natural result of widespread adoption.

There's more people tinkering with dev boards and writing open source software, too, so it's not all bad.

Im saying I really started noticing the divide between the computer literate and the computer illiterate - that its actually becoming an issue in exactly the same ways general illiteracy became an issue as reading and writing became widespread.

With likely similar implications.

Which makes me sad.

Yeah, it is pretty sad. I'm really worried about manufacturers locking down everything, both in software and hardware.

And people just don't care because they don't know how or why it affects them, until it's too late.

Can't really force everyone to learn IT more in-depth, but maybe making IT/computing a higher priority in schools is a good idea.

Hasn't it always been this way? The only difference is now there are a lot more computer-illiterate people using computers.

Wouldn't say so. As Kovek so very nicely put it further up:

"Computer Literacy provides tools to interact with information."

Easy to forget the iPhone was ~2007, prior to this computers were still a fairly niche market and Android still in its infancy, computer literacy gave an advantage but computer illiteracy wasn't really a big disadvantage.

Now literally every industry from mom and pop stores to basic healthcare demand a pretty high level of computer literacy to the point they don't survive long without it.

You shouldn't be tech savvy to have your right to privacy respected. We need regulation to compel companies like Apple to stop harvesting data they don't have legitimate need for. Any surveillance should be opt in only.