So, here's some different themes in the thread so far, some ideas spawned from the article, and thoughts on them:
Author is a jerk for the TLDR at the beginning
Sure--it's unfortunate that such a red herring was thrown into an otherwise excellent article.
Normal people shouldn't have to learn how to into computer.
This is unreasonable. "People don't want to learn how to computer, they want to learn how to get X done" is a great statement, but there's a distressing endpoint to it: if you simply learn how to get X done, instead of the framework for using resources that enable things including X, you become a technician, a cog. One day I'm going to write an Excel spreadsheet VB macro, and your whole department is out of a job. One day somebody will release YourJobaaService and then you are useless. And because you spent your life becoming a technician, you won't be able to enjoy your newfound free time, because you can't do anything other than blithely consume the content others have created.
People still treat computers as new things.
We've had personal computers for nigh-on three or four decades now, and the fact that they're still treated in popular culture as magic black boxes is a failing on our part as techies for not educating better the rest of the population. We probably did it to curry favor, to enjoy the power of knowing something they didn't, but damned if it isn't going to bite us in the end.
As the author deftly points out, these folks are going to become our political leaders--and however little we think of their policies in regards to technology, they'll be that way because we failed to impress on them the knowledge that they needed. For anyone who's been paying attention to the darker subtext of the PRISM scandal, you can draw the uncomfortable conclusion that the government is saying: "Hey, tech sector, guess what--the halcyon days of your industry ignoring us are over. We matter, we command, and you obey. Get back into line."
Things would be different if any politician making clearly false claims about technology and the way it works could be and was mocked publicly, much as we mock US politicians with too much of the Jesus.
IT front-line people are seen as janitors and treated accordingly.
Many of us have been there, many of us have probably chatted up a member of the preferred sex and tried to display value as somebody who can Fix Things (tm) or just stepped in to help a friend unfuck a colossally broken setup. This gets you quickly shunted off into the IT monkey box. You become not a person, but an annoyingly human interface over a set of skills that can be tapped on command to make problems go away. You aren't seen as a person, you're seen as a vending machine of computer repair. Again, this is probably our own fault--instead of teaching people how to fix their own problems, many of us used our positions and social skills (or lack thereof) to cultivate exactly this caste. Mistakes, mistakes.
People don't know how to use computers as engines of computation.
The rise of the Web and the mobile device is mostly to blame for this, though the idea of a Mac as something your grandmother could use goes back many decades.
The problem is, knowing how to use a computer isn't like knowing how to fix your car, how to change its oil, or how to replace your water pump and radiator--a simple mechanical task that one could argue is redundant. It's about a way of thinking, about a way of abstracting problems and creating generalized solutions, about recognizing patterns in a system and applying just enough force to overcome your issue in an elegant fashion. This mindset is important to cultivate, and carries over to solving other problems and enriching your life.
Mankind is foremost a tool-user, and to deny that basic responsibility to our fellow humans is to tacitly acknowledge that they are subhuman.