Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's Mindstorms
Preface: I&#x27;m going to use a really loose definition of AI here for a minute, which includes any computer agent that makes decisions a human might make. So, your alarm clock is an AI, the code that rejects your credit application is an AI, but the code that decides how exactly to paint this letter C is not. Now on to my comment:<p>I think children should learn to think about programs at a  young age, because understanding AIs will be equally as important as understanding other humans in the coming century.<p>We will see more and more interaction with AIs who have powerful capabilities beyond what most humans can do. We will start to see AIs with emotional palettes and developmental trajectories that will allow them to integrate with us socially. But also, the little AIs like the alarm clock and the credit check are already more and more common gating structures in peoples&#x27; lives.<p>As long as the majority doesn&#x27;t think about programs too much, you can ignore them too. But as more and more people program, like reading it will become more and more of a disability not to. Being able to think &quot;natively&quot; in software is going to be important. Not mandatory, but important.<p>Why isn&#x27;t that employment AI you met finding any construction jobs for you? Does the physician AI really understand the probability that your Dad is NOT, zero probability, going to cut back his saturated fat? Your gardening AI (which is crossed with several other AIs that help you manage your household) says to plant corn, but your neighbors haven&#x27;t yet, does it know something they don&#x27;t?<p>If you can read code, those are questions you can ask.