It might cause a diminution of service while these things were going on, but it should never cause a lack of service. The analogy I used was the delivery of electricity by the power companies. At the moment, I would like to be able to do simple things. In the immediate future, I can envision doing a CPU-intensive research project while writing this note and posting it. In the far future, I expect that a computer will be used to monitor the functions of maintaining my environment.
Air quality is already an issue.
Water potability just became an issue this summer. I can certainly envision a local computer system doing the monitoring, treating, warning of danger. Granted, the implementation in TOPS10 doesn't solve all these problems, but it certainly had a huge headstart on it. Because they are here. They are cheap.