> What would a large fraction of the population need this skill for?
Managing the rapidly increasing number of computerized systems.
>our everyday systems are designed by an increasingly smaller group of people.
What are you talking about? Open source is bigger than ever. There are more computer scientists than ever. I can't think of a context in which this statement is true.
Maybe it could be interpreted as "the top 10 most widely used programs today were written by a population of programmers who are a smaller fraction of the population of users than has ever before been true before". (That might still not be true: the number of people who work as programmers at Facebook or Microsoft might well be growing much faster on average than the worldwide population of people who use the software they write!)
Managing the rapidly increasing number of computerized systems.
>our everyday systems are designed by an increasingly smaller group of people.
What are you talking about? Open source is bigger than ever. There are more computer scientists than ever. I can't think of a context in which this statement is true.