Besides the title being pedantic, I feel this article is alienated from the average person I know who is always modeling and dealing with symbols and representa

Besides the title being pedantic, I feel this article is alienated from the average person I know who is always modeling and dealing with symbols and representations in the world, but less often takes a step back to realize the practice of their modeling and to judge its efficacy. To me, modeling seems equivalent to consciousness. To me cave paintings of animals seem significant because they illustrate 41k yo humans creating representations of their world (for mental practice, entertainment, ceremony, who knows...), whether they realized their practice is another question. But today, there are many people who model and recognize it, think of manipulative salespeople/lawyers/cads, great fiction writers, constipated philosophers and art/film/lit critics, scientists, artists/architects/designers... You don't __need__ any technology built after 1980 (or whatever) to explore the world... Even thought experiments can shake an academic field (Maxwell's demon, Schrodinger's cat, EPR paradox...) I agree that there may be better tools to convince people to contemplate environments and unpack/model/break down confusing things into collections of simple theories than to send them to a liberal arts college (where this and goofing off is really all there is to do in my experience)... But programming is still the new literacy IMO. I feel like all the white collar underpaid people I know could work 2-4 hours a day of their 10 hour/day jobs if they wrote the most limited, banal, imperative script that abstracts no concepts and in completely un-generalized (and therefore fails at modelling). And I feel just this fact, that there would be a great liberation of 1st world mankind's time if every non-programmer who uses a computer for their job up and wrote a severely shitty program that automated some aspect of their responsibilities, is enough to say that a coding is the new literacy. Think of what kind of intellectual shift a machine-literate public that just cut their work week in half would result in...