Comment by coldpie
3 hours ago
We had water and traffic control and electricity for decades and centuries before the Internet. It is less convenient and more expensive, but it also means hostile countries can't literally poison your drinking water from across the planet. It's not a difficult trade to consider.
Is it really more expensive to not connect a water treatment plant to the internet? I can imagine the vendor selling that idea but I struggle to come up with how that could make a water treatment plant cheaper to operate.
The expense usually comes in operations. By connecting the water treatment plant to the Internet and making it remotely operable, you can have one guy who sits in an office and is responsible for overseeing the water quality at many different treatment plants. If everything is local, you need one guy on site at each different plant. People are expensive, software is cheap.
Of course, by making it remotely operable, that one guy could be replaced with a guy in Russia who's job is to poison everyone.