We now live in a society where the technology is changing most of the time and some people don't keep up with that technology and in some cases even though they may have knowledge of it, not having an understanding of how it works, can be life threatening.
A very good friend of mine told me that his daughter had been involved in a head-on car accident on an open road. She was driving along with her 2 year old son in the back who had lost his dummy and was complaining about that. She was in a modern car with all the bells and whistles in relation to technology, one of which wasLane centring. She switched on the lane centring and then took her eyes of the road for a very short period of time, to look for the dummy. The car wandered across centreline and had a head on accident with a car coming the other way. Luckily it was not directly head-on and nobody was majorly injured. Both cars were totally written off
It turned out that that section of road had been recently resealed and had no line markings. The white lines are used by the computer, lane centering function to keep the car within it's lane. Without the line markings it was unable to do that. No doubt ther would have been some sort of right up about that in the owners manual These manuals are usually multiple inches thick. Who ever reads the owners manuals of their car. Even if she had read it and saw that their were no road markings,did she understand it, and it's implications. You don't have to do a test on the modern technology in your car to be able to get a licence.
There have been numerous aircraft accidents, with mas loss of life involving very highly experienced and qualified airline pilots not understanding the newer technology of ther aircraft. They had been trained on the technology and shown how to use it, but in some cases because they did not understand it, an accident happened.
Eg. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_140
In the case of the Boeing 737 Max situation the pilot's we're not aware of the technology to even be able to have an understanding.
An implication of intellectual property laws
See: Boeing To Pay $2.5 Billion Settlement Over Deadly 737 Max Crashes
Most of the people that write computer software, no about bugs in software. Even non-computer programmers, can see there are bugs in computer software. A bug basically means that the software does not do what it's supposed to do. Bugs are prolific, are in most software and quite often are not revealed, sometimes for years after the software is released.
Yet despite of this the software industry is moving towards artificiall intelligence. Part of this is computers learning and making decisions based on what they have learnt.
If computer programmers don't understand the programs their writing enough to be able to make ther programs bugfree, what chance have they got in understanding the implications of artificial intelligence.
That's why people such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Noam Chomsky, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis co-signed a letter from 1,000 experts in artificial intelligence, basically saying that AI should not be used in autonomous weapons. But for “national security” reasons no one will tell us if they are.
But even if AI weapons are used with human override, unless the person using it understands how it works, thers still potential problems.
Here are a few newer technologies that most people don't understand:
This is digital currency that is based on the scarcity of massive computing power. Unlike normal computer data that is easily copied and transferred from one computer to another it has facilities within it which allows the bitcoin data to be only owned by one person at a time.
This is the technology behind Bitcoin, and many other newer technologies, which allows the one piece of data to be only owned by one person at one time. It's based on a public ledger stored on multiple computers reducing the ability to be able to make fraudulent transactions.
These allow a piece of digital data to be owned one person or entity but still be available and copied multiple times to any number of people or entities. It is recently been used to trade digital art.
Currently the most valuable companies in the world are all in Information Technology (IT) field.
They derive their value not from building and selling computer hardware but by owning the intellectual property of computer software. Both intellectual property and computer software are non-tangible. That means they are not physical, they can't be touched, felt or seen.
It's completely reasonable that people do not understand modern technology, because most people don't understand the bigger picture of societal systems that existed before information technology.
Human thought is not reality it's only a fictitious story. Yet those stories have allowed the human species to dominate every other species on the planet.
See a talk given by Yuval Harari
Things like Laws, Money Time and corporations only exist because people have faith in them and believe the story associated with them. Aggregate faith is all they are. Most people don't understand that.
But although the stories are not real, they are needed.
Yuval has a good way of distinguishing between what is real and what is just a fictitious story. It's suffering. Laws, money, time and corporations cannot suffer. Therefore they are not real but only a fictitious story.
The most obvious thing is to teach understanding rather than knowledge. But that could be difficult. The education system in the past put more emphasis on knowledge rather than understanding and consequently many that went through the education system, think they only need to know how to do something not understand what they're doing.
The problem with only having knowledge is there is only a limited amount of knowledge that can be acquired and maintained. But with understanding it's possible derive knowledge from understanding.
As an example in previous education systems students taught to rote-learn times tables. But if they understand multiplication rather than just memorizing it they can work out any multiplication problem.
For those that went through the previous system, if the above was explained to them, they may be more interested in learning understanding rather than only knowledge.
An education system that puts more emphasize, at a very young students age, on understanding rather than knowledge
A bi-product of such a system could be that less teachers may be required because more students may understand how they learn so be able to self learn.