> As to the need for coding so that humans could interact with machines, I think in the long run, this is also going to progress to the point where the machine would be aware of the abilities of the human it's dealing with and make it easy for the human to interact with itself.
And when is that long run going to play out, in the next 50, 100, 500 years? A lot of the learn to code movement is about economic empowerment, providing an avenue for economic advancement for children and adults, especially children and adults that wouldn't have thought coding as a career was possible for them or have had the access to resources to really pursue it.
Yes, automation is eliminating jobs, but still creating new and well paying technical ones. Whether and when we'll reach some technological singularity is all based on a lot of conjecture, and how that ultimately will pan out with how we structure our economy is impossible to predict. In the mean time we have the current reality, one that most likely will result in tech providing plenty of well paying jobs for at least a few more generations. The idea of coding as literacy, as has been stated before, isn't that everyone needs to become a software engineer. It's that as a person coming from any background you at least get the opportunity to see if it's a career you would want to pursue, and if not at least give you more insight into how technology works and make you a more well rounded citizen.