A related theme is addressed in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End in which the trend of technology has veered toward sealing hardware within inaccessible modules, so one cannot tinker with them. The motivation is the same whether in hardware or software: to reduce the extent to which an individual can reverse engineer a system. On the one hand this prevents maliciously motivated fiddling but on the other prevents learning by deconstruction and, more insidiously, could accustom people to be less inquisitive.
I think we're already seeing the results of partial applications of that technique. Computers used to require programming knowledge just to operate. Thus, an entire generation of computer-using children grew up to be the programmers of today's computers. Today's children are locked in Fisher Price GUIs on devices that can't write code, or even run unsigned that that you might somehow write. Computer Science enrollment is already down and will only continue to drop as fewer and fewer young people are able to tinker with computers.