Necessity is the mother of invention. No necessity means no invention. Right now, we're building an entire generation that will be unable to produce computer innovation because they've become complacent: they believe that facebook is the end of the computer world. That would be fine if facebook actually were the end of the computer world, but it isn't. In thirty years we'll need those people to manage sprawling databases, automate more and more complex systems, and generally bend computers to their will, and they'll be unprepared and inadequate.
I don't see the relation here. If there was no facebook or other apps, people would not use the computer, they would watch TV, go to pub, or stuff like that.
These people that use facebook, mostly, just don't care about computers, they want to interact with their friends and have fun.
What would you suggest? Making facebook harder to use? Making people learn to program to publish a message on twitter?
Users are just users, they don't want to know how it works. It was always like this.
In the early 80's, reaching a million sold of home computers used mostly for games was a major milestone. The best selling home computer of all time by far - the C64 - "only" sold 20 million or so.
Most of the people using them never learned to do more than load and start games.
While we're probably building a generation where a smaller proportion of those who use computers extensively know details about them, it'd be pretty incredibly if the absolute numbers of people with development skills at the level of those of us who grew up with those home computers weren't significantly higher.
E.g. AIDE - an IDE for writing Android apps on Android devices, quite the special niche, shows up as 100k - 500k downloads on Google Play.
Ohloh reports projects with more than 10k participants and over half a million projects total, and 1.6 million total users (though that's likely over-reporting, as for unclaimed user names there might be substantial duplication).
I find it a pretty safe assumption that the number of programmers has never been higher - we just make up a smaller percentage of computer users.
Innovation is brought by those who care. I don't know, where this notion that everyone should care about computers comes from. There are tool makers, and there are tool users. The latter are always a minority compared to the former.
There are generations of people who don't know how to farm or how to build an automobile. So what?
