Simplicity is closely related to education, and education is closely related to freedom.
How are we supposed to take education seriously when we create devices of such complexity that they are essentially magic, and hand them to students?
Before computers, complexity always had tight upper bounds. A watch could only get so complex before it wouldn't fit in its housing; and a car could only get so complex before it could not be efficiently manufactured/repaired. With computers, there is no upper bound to the complexity.
We are now overrun with complexity, but it's hard to see how to fix that. A business that puts blind faith in a complex system to do something slightly faster/better will probably win against a business that tries to truly understand what it's doing. An employee who just keeps adding to the complexity will probably win against an employee stepping back to simplify things. A consumer who makes convenient choices about complex things without asking many questions will probably find life easier.
Simlpicity is related to education in a sense that education is about teaching you a sequence of simple steps that lead toward the complex.
Also, I think the perception of computers being magic doesn't come as much from their complexity as from the people who try to force the complex into looking like it's simple. They're hiding complexity so hard the end result doesn't make any logical sense, so it's magic.
AK had a lovely quote in the article:
"Well, a saying I made up at PARC was, “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” They’ve got simple things being simple and they have complex things being impossible, so that’s wrong."
Education offers tools to help manage complexity -- abstract mathematics and lab sciences help us understand the complex world around us.
But that has mostly been used to manage complexity that already existed (e.g. physics, biology), or that is somehow inherent to our world (e.g. complexity resulting from social interactions among humans).
Now, we are creating our own, new kinds of complexity that didn't exist before. Software isn't there to help us manage complexity, it is adding to the complexity of our world, and dramatically so. That moves education backwards.
How are we supposed to take education seriously when we create devices of such complexity that they are essentially magic, and hand them to students?
Before computers, complexity always had tight upper bounds. A watch could only get so complex before it wouldn't fit in its housing; and a car could only get so complex before it could not be efficiently manufactured/repaired. With computers, there is no upper bound to the complexity.
We are now overrun with complexity, but it's hard to see how to fix that. A business that puts blind faith in a complex system to do something slightly faster/better will probably win against a business that tries to truly understand what it's doing. An employee who just keeps adding to the complexity will probably win against an employee stepping back to simplify things. A consumer who makes convenient choices about complex things without asking many questions will probably find life easier.