The reason everyone would benefit from this high level understanding is the ubiquity of computation. It's going to affect all our lives, like it or not, you should understand at least a little about something like that if you can. You want a population who have a useful mental model when they're told e.g. that parole will now be decided by "an algorithm" and will ask useful questions like "Will we be provided with an understandable explanation of the algorithm or its decisions that we can criticise?" or "What parameters is the algorithm to consider?" not "Will the algorithm have a man's voice or a woman's voice?" or "What if the algorithm becomes sentient and tries to kill us all?"