Hmmm. Interesting. I don't need to know much about electrical engineering to use electric and electronic devices all day long. As you say, they're even more pervasive than software.

Two ideas come to mind. First, maybe this is because electricity has gone far beyond "pervasive" into "fully invisible". Second, maybe this is because software is inherently more complex and can't be made fully invisible.

Maybe both ideas are actually the same, but playing on different points of their lifecycles - will software become so industrialised and standardised within a century that it will become as invisible as electricity?

Thinking about early car owners, who needed some non-trivial understanding of how it worked just to be able to use it, or how you needed to know some trivial amount of BASIC to do anything at all with the 80's home computers (<3 ZX Spectrum).