You bring up a very good point. Actually, I think this issue warrants an entire blog post in response. I think there are indeed huge dangers in informationization that could be catastrophic.
So I guess we need to determine whether informationization is a force that can be stopped, and if it's not, what can we do to minimize catastrophic failure. One thing could be to have certain physical/static baselines to fall back to (like shelters, food, minimum levels of non-liquid wealth). Or convert some of NNT's black-swan heuristics into well known practices (e.g. "Learn to be redundant, don’t be optimal.", "have small losses if you are wrong, and big profits if you are right", etc.)
I haven't put a lot of thought into the risks and downsides of informationization actually, and perhaps not enough people out there aren't either. At this year's Singularity Summit there was a real lack of skepticism and interest in debating some of these core downsides and dangers.
So I guess we need to determine whether informationization is a force that can be stopped, and if it's not, what can we do to minimize catastrophic failure. One thing could be to have certain physical/static baselines to fall back to (like shelters, food, minimum levels of non-liquid wealth). Or convert some of NNT's black-swan heuristics into well known practices (e.g. "Learn to be redundant, don’t be optimal.", "have small losses if you are wrong, and big profits if you are right", etc.)
I haven't put a lot of thought into the risks and downsides of informationization actually, and perhaps not enough people out there aren't either. At this year's Singularity Summit there was a real lack of skepticism and interest in debating some of these core downsides and dangers.