Look, I'm not really on board with the whole "teach everyone to code" thing, I don't think everyone needs to know Java like their own mother tongue, but if the last few days have shown us anything it is that some form of technical literacy is absolutely necessary.

We can't have people in charge being hoodwinked because they don't even understand the fundamentals or the basics, because they don't vaguely understand that "one line of code" means nothing, or that Excel isn't a substitute for a database.

People who are making critical decisions about IT infrastructure for a country-wide thing need to be able to understand some of the basics, or they need advisors who do to be constantly in the loop. Because we've seen what happens when they don't know what questions to ask.

We stopped pushing people towards the ECDL because we assumed that everyone growing up now would be a digital native, but we've left huge gaps and it shows.

For a start, most kids interact with tablets or phones, not laptops, so they don't gain an understanding of filesystems.

You wouldn't have to teach someone of my generation about files and folders, but they're just not really a concept on tablets, which usually have a very locked-down OS.

Digital natives aren't native with the tech we thought they would be. So we need to teach them.

We also need to upskill those who did not grow up with ubiquitous technology and wifi everywhere, so that they understand more. So that they can understand the implications of the decisions they make, because like it or not, they are the decision makers right now.

If we are going to keep marching towards a world where technology takes over more and more of the jobs that would have been done by humans, we *badly* need the decision making humans to understand, at a high level, what they are doing, and most importantly, the limitations.

It is increasingly and abundantly clear that many people still think of code as some mystical unknowable thing, and think of computers as something akin to the AI we see in movies, but truly, they're not that smart and it's really important that this is understood.