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Originally Posted by BWinmill
The article is also missing out on key points.
Even without the Internet, a lot of this infrastructure would still use computers and telecommunications equipment to increase automation. The only difference is that it would have been done over the telephone networks. Those networks would have the same issues with security. (Why would they do it either way? Cost. You don't need as many people to do the work. You don't have to pay people to travel to facilities.)
Convenience may sound trivial, but it allows us to do more. Research that once took hours, or even days, of being hunched over books can now be done in minutes. You no long have to spend half an hour traveling to a public library and back, or an hour traveling to a university library and back, simply to access resources. Library hours aren't an issue either, if you're doing personal research when your not at work.
Access due to availability and cost is also a huge benefit. I've lived in communities where the only library was a poorly managed elementary school library. The nearest real library was several hundred kilometers away. In one community, reaching that library would involve an expensive flight. Books by mail would be an alternative, but that involves an expensive long distance phone call to access the catalog while being unable to explore the options yourself. (Librarians may be good, but they aren't mind readers!) In that sense the Internet is a boon to business and education.
Is the Internet as important as electricity and antibiotics? Well, we can't have an Internet without electricity and electricity has other uses. I suppose that electricity wins out there. Antibiotics, well that sounds important cuz it saves lives! Or maybe not. I'm pretty sure that sanitation saved more lives than antibiotics. Sanitation is mostly about information and can be reduced to simple social/physical engineering in many cases. Properly used, the Internet may be of greater value than antibiotics when it comes down to saving lives because it provides access to the necessary information.
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Way back in 1969 I was in a Data Processing class in a small town and the connection was a teletype machine using punched tape over a land line lol.
As long as we don't "burn the hardcopy books" we will do fine. It would be harder without cell phones, tv, etc but no worse than without electricity, cars and other 20th/21st century improvements.