I’m not the op—they explicitly stated programming is not a skill like reading or writing—but I’ll go down this rhetorical path for fun and say: sure, why not?
The utopian aim of technology is all about offloading burdensome work so we can focus more on the things we enjoy. If reading is a burden to someone, why not let them use a TTS? If long division is a burden, why not let them use a pocket calculator? They’ll probably learn enough to get by even if they never get to the point of reading Dostoevsky by sight.
Lest you say, “well but those skills are essential!”, humans needed food to survive before we needed mathematics or written language, yet we’ve been been OK outsourcing farming for at least a century because we’ve experienced how it frees us up to pursue other things. And, to that end, we’ll probably be facing some pretty extreme civilizational crisis if we get to the point that someone without basic maths skills can’t find a calculator.
I'm not talking about dreams or utopia. Just real modern life - one is way behind opportunity wise if they can't read and can't do math. At some point, that wasn't the case. Many signs point to being able to write instructions for a computer being a core skill for a good life.
If your kid rolls their eyes and says "no math/reading for me thanks", you don't just accept it and figure they'll find what they love - you figure some way to make them learn and it's at least a few months of hard work for a kid(and parent) to sort of get escape velocity .
It's possible that programming will end up in the same spot.
Possible but unlikely. I mean programming in the "code" sense.
We all "program" computers every day (when you turn on a microwave, when you talk to Alexa, when you do a budget in Excel, or write a Doc in Word.)
Coding is not an essential skill. It's clearly a useful skill, its a valuable skill, but pretty much no-one in my real life can code. And from what I've learned teaching others most people -can't- code, regardless of education.
I fly to place all the time, but I outsource the piloting. Programmers both argue that coding should be learnt by everyone, and at the same time most that it's getting easier (and hence less valuable) to do it.
The utopian aim of technology is all about offloading burdensome work so we can focus more on the things we enjoy. If reading is a burden to someone, why not let them use a TTS? If long division is a burden, why not let them use a pocket calculator? They’ll probably learn enough to get by even if they never get to the point of reading Dostoevsky by sight.
Lest you say, “well but those skills are essential!”, humans needed food to survive before we needed mathematics or written language, yet we’ve been been OK outsourcing farming for at least a century because we’ve experienced how it frees us up to pursue other things. And, to that end, we’ll probably be facing some pretty extreme civilizational crisis if we get to the point that someone without basic maths skills can’t find a calculator.