The same reasons we keep on teaching kids to read, write, do math, sketch, take photos, etc ... because it is fun, empowering and important.

Most of them will never become professional actors, authors, mathematicians, artists, photographers, etc ... and yet they will rely on those skills, on their own or combined, pretty much every single day of their lives.

Why build pine wood derby cars? Why paint pictures? Or take photographs? Why memorize poetry? Why build things with Legos?

Because it makes your brain think through problems, breaking them down to the point you can build a solution from the smallest pieces. AI may be a big part of the future, but we need to maintain our own human creativity and problem solving skills, and learning the tools that are available will help us to build and create useful things throughout our lives.

I'm a software engineer turned public middle school science teacher.

At the moment, I would never encourage any of my students to go into software engineering. It seems to me that's rapidly becoming a field where a small competitive handful will be making millions and everyone else will be unemployed.

That said, I have no problem teaching some programming. We're going to be making autonomous greenhouses soon, with windows that open or whatever, and they'll be using Scratch to program their micro:bits.

Anything that empowers you to do stuff is a good thing.

Programming encourages analytical thinking, and also if no-one learns to program it'll become magic, and that'll be a major societal step back.

Why do we teach them to add and multiply we have calculators?

Why do we teach them to read, we have text to voice?

Why do we teach them to broom, we have Roombas?

Why do we teach them to do the dishes, we have dish-washers?

</sarcasm>

Because programming is fun