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An excerpt out of Active Essays - What is "Serious Discourse" and "Literacy"? by Alan Kay (1996)

Literacy is more than being able to read a streetsign or write a party invitation -- it is being fluent in the ideas and issues of humankind and being able to use and create symbolic representations to understand and explore them further. The pressing issues of the 21st century will require new carriers of serious discourse that will be as large a step from the essay and classical mathematics as those were from collections of proverbs.

[..] many of the most serious issues of the next century will involve complex nonlinear systems [..]. These are not easily explained, argued about, or understood in terms of day-to-day language or classical mathematics. But many of their most important characteristics can be dynamically modeled and explored on the computer. [..]

The most important media of the 21st century will provide the framework for the next level of human thought.

While computational notebooks have made some good progress since this was written, I am under the impression that they don't really provide the framework for next level of human thought. A pity, for indeed the problems of this century are indeed pressing and we could collectively use any real help we can get.