[Wutang]

Nassim Taleb has talked about this in his works...our current infrastructure is "fragile" as opposed to "anti-fragile" or "robust" - using these terms in the way he does (hint: there's more to it then just the dictionary definitions). There's a trade off between efficiency vs. robustness for any system and according to him, we are heavily tipped towards to the efficiency side of the scale which could lead to lots of problems in the future - such as the doomsday scenarios you guys are discussing above. The example Taleb used as an illustration was power grids - to make them more efficient you have to sacrifice robustness which means that yes you are generating more power but if something goes wrong then a greater part of the grid will go down as there are less backups. I'm sure you guys can easily see how this can be implied to information storage when it comes to storing something on a server vs. a book.