honestly it's magic even when you understand it. Computers are pieces of rocks drawn on with runes in rare mineral ink, infused with lighting, and then made to do maths by generations of magicians perfecting the translation from the primal language of what can be only described as a pulse of being only made apparent by the times when it's not being, to words humans can comprehend, then with that maths they somehow they create illusions of entire new worlds, and did I mention they can telepathically communicate with other magical rocks? all through mystical waves all around us created by beacons big and small in key locations. Previously, to talk with a person on the other side of the planet, a single attempt to communicate would require months, if not years, now? seconds. if not less. Computers are magic.

Nothing I said was critical of anyone, any set of skills, any profession. I'm glad that you have specialist skills, everyone does because no-one can know everything

I was responding to a particular question about technology, and how non-techies approach it. I explained in another comment that this complexity in technology is fundamentally different from many other fields of everyday experience

If the industrial fan stops working, they call you, and somewhere between the power point and the air they want to move is the problem you can fix and diagnose

If someone can't see their cat photos, it could be anywhere from their device to their network, their ISP to the server, the programs on that server, the other server that holds the photos... Like with the fan they know the power is generally ok because the lights didn't go out, but from that point you actually need some conceptual model of the complexity to even know who to call

There was a period of time, way back when, in which personal computers were relatively common in households, but repair services basically didn’t exist in most places. Computers were still expensive, and not really useful enough that you’d just go buy a new one when it broke, you’d either fix it or hope someone you know could show you how.

That was a time of “learn or don’t use it” (we had a pc we couldn’t use for 6 months until we figured out how to fix it) and it’s sad that it was so short, because only a very specific age group of people grew up with that pioneering mindset. Since then it’s gotten more “user friendly/foolproof” (locked down and hidden) and the knowledge of how to do stuff with it is becoming more rare on the whole.

I always sort of expected that generations younger than mine would be more tech inclined (inner workings, not just using it) but they really aren’t due to how so much of our modern tech is just.. not approachable, locked, or hidden.

The primary reason is that the technology is designed in such a way that large distributed teams of people can build them without anyone needing to understand the entire structure, because the entire structure is beyond the understanding of a single mind.

A software developer wouldn't even try to read all the source code of all the libraries their app relies on, nor the machine operations and logic operations and character encodings and chip design and the chemistry and physics of computation.

We've consciously decided to abstract things down to reliable interfaces, and as long as the thing behind the interface works, we can understand the interface and build on top of it.

These other reasons are secondary to this one: people don't understand fully because we've gone beyond what a human can fully understand, and deliberately and consciously, decided to adopt this system of abstractions and interface contracts to allow ourselves to operate in the space beyond where the human mind can go.