The question that these sorts of articles always raise is ultimately , should we treat computation as something like mechanical expertise which is important but can be easily outsourced or is it more like literacy which is critical to just about every profession and is often used as a proxy for intelligence?

It strikes me that the real difficulty is drawing a line between which tasks should be left to technical professionals and which should be within reach of the layman?

This is much easier to define in the case of mechanical devices which tend to be fairly fixed function rather than computers which are applicable in an almost infinite number of tasks.

For example , you wouldn't expect a car driver to be able to modify their own vehicle, but you would expect a lay computer user to be able to do tasks such as changing their wallpaper or installing software on their computer. I wonder if this is partly what is driving the popularity of computer hardware with artificially imposed constraints? Is it simply easier to understand when you use separate devices for reading books and playing games?

It also begs the question over whether simply changing the means with which to do something changes the nature of the task. For example is somebody designing a complex logical system not "programming" because they are doing it inside of a spreadsheet program instead of an IDE?