Why Do We Buy the Myth of Y2K?

An expert's prediction: dog licenses will fail to expire, and hotel guests won't get wake-up calls

By Danny Hillis

By now you have heard about the coming apocalypse. Computers, advancing their clocks into the double-zero abyss of the new millennium, will plunge us into chaos. Power grids will fail, elevators will crash and pacemakers will stop midbeat. Personally, I doubt it. Here is my version: Thousands of hotel guests will fail to get their wake-up calls. Dog licenses will fail to expire.

I feel like a traitor for breaking ranks with my fellow computer experts and admitting what I really think. The truth is that society is not nearly so dependent on bug-free technology as the experts would lead you to believe. Most mainframes are not doing anything of earth-shattering, time-critical importance. The paychecks they write can still be verified by humans before they are mailed. And most microprocessors embedded in industrial equipment do not even know what time it is, much less depend on the date's being right.

What interests me most about the Millennium Bug is why this particular potential for disaster has captured the collective imagination. Why Y2K (as we experts call it) instead of bio-terrorism, the next energy crisis or the return of the swine flu? I believe it is because this story has all the makings of a great rumor: Convincing Detail, Cooperative Experts and a Hint of Deeper Truth.

For Convincing Detail, just mix a little Millennium Bug with any technology that makes you nervous. Whether it is nuclear power plants, elevators or airplanes, this bug can supply a persuasive dose of precision. Like Caesar's warning of the ides of March, we are promised an unspecified disaster on a specific date. I remember a fortune cookie that said: "You will receive bad news from Canada on February 22." I didn't. Yet among all the fuzzy promises of happiness, love and success, this is the fortune I remember.

The next ingredient of this rumor is Cooperative Experts. These come in two flavors, talkative and silent. The talkative experts are willing to speculate: Maybe pacemakers have calendar routines? Maybe elevators will crash? The responsible experts mostly keep their mouths shut. They know that any problems with their own computers are more likely to cause inconvenience than disaster, but they don't know for sure about the extent of other industries' problems, so they just keep quiet.

Combine these two types of experts with a resourceful journalist, and you get a story. You can imagine how the elevator story got started. After talking to a series of experts with vague concerns, a reporter finally finds someone who speculates, "Maybe elevators' microcontrollers will crash." All the expert really knows is that some industrial machines have microcontrollers that keep track of whether they have received regular maintenance. If so, on Jan. 1, 2000, a calendar error might cause some of these elevators to think that they have not been maintained for a hundred years. "Anything could happen," the expert says. "Anything" would probably mean the elevator's quietly sitting on the ground floor waiting for maintenance, but the image of its plunging to the ground makes better copy. Pretty soon we are all thinking of taking the stairs on New Year's Day.

This explains how the rumor begins, but it would have no staying power without the Hint of Deeper Truth. The deeper truth in this case is that technology has become so complicated that we no longer understand it. Most people have suspected this for a while, but now they know for sure that there is not somebody somewhere who understands how it all works. Of course, those of us close to technology have been certain of this uncertainty for a long time. We know that there is no map of the Internet. We accept the fact that there is no master engineer who completely understands the airplane we are flying in.

I took my car in to be serviced a few months ago because it was losing power at high speed. After plugging the engine into some kind of diagnostic device, the mechanic told me authoritatively, "It's The Module. We'll have to replace it." "What does The Module do?" I asked. He shrugged. "It breaks."

I was annoyed at how much the mechanic charged me, so I exacted my revenge as I paid the bill. "This better be year-2000 compliant," I said ominously. For the first time since my arrival, he looked a bit concerned.

I have come to believe that the Y2K apocalypse is a myth. The truth is not that civilization will come to an end, but rather that civilization as we once knew it has ended already. We are no longer in complete command of our creations. We are back in the jungle, only this time it is a jungle of our own creation. The technological environment we live within is something to be manipulated and influenced, but never again something to control. There are no real experts, only people who understand their own little pieces of the puzzle. The big picture is a mystery to us, and the big news is that nobody knows.

-- Norm (nwo@hotmail.com), May 24, 1999

Answers

The Hillis essay is already being discussed at this link:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000rjf

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), May 24, 1999.

Norm, since you insist upon always polluting this forum with your worthless garbage, would you please enlighten us by answering the following questions:

1. How much money are you being paid by John Koreskin and Bill Clinton to spin y2k?

2. Will you feel bad when people die because they listened to you and didn't prepare for y2k?

3. Do you have anything over a 8th grade education, or are you as ignorant and stupid as you sound?

4. Do you always belive what you see in the media and what Bill Clinton says?

5. Since you never have anything positive to contribute to this discussion board, why do you stay here and make life miserable for us? Is it because you have no friends and this is the only way that you can feel good about yourself?

6. Why do you never respond to the answer threads on your posts? Is it because you cannot deal with the facts and truth that people respond with, or are you just a cowardly weakling who is afraid of being recognized for the fool that you are?

-- Norm Sucks (norm@isafool.com), May 24, 1999.

Often, the people who talk so much about myth strongly disagree with Jung on human intuition...

I find it unfortunate that I haven't found any social anthropoligists and psychologists seriously weighing in on Y2K. I guess corporate organization and exotic, orientalist questions are more interesting to them. If they did throw in their two cents, we might have some more interesting food for thought (for both optimists and pessimists) as Flint points out. Indeed, it appears that the potential threat of Y2K has not been academically and professionally examined by the EXPERTS.

However you define common sense, I think that you will agree with me that sometimes, common sense is on the money. Sometimes, it is not. Sometimes, uncommon sense is required. I tend to read Poole's use of common sense as "popular mood" and he is quite right about the popular mood. But "popular mood" and "common sense" seem to be classically distinct concepts. Common sense denotes a certain degree of prudence and prudent actions, while popular mood denotes a certain group think.

In regard to the ambiguities of potential Y2K problems, common sense may be found between Mr. Decker's preparations (7 days water, 30 days food, wood stove, and lowered debt) and my own preparation goals (3 months food and water, wood stove, lantern and lamp, hand crank radio and flashlight, alternate professional/income preparation, reducing market risk, camping gear, bug out bags, etc.). Uncommon sense in action may range from 6 months preps to 1 year (or more) of preps.

Uncommon sense will vary with the mileage. In regard to Y2K, it seems to refer to a willingness to make real and hard sacrifices in one's current lifestyle (living on beans and rice today in order to buy more beans and rice tomorrow) and changes to previous retirement planning strategies (cashing in retirement plans and losing some of that money due to penalties and taxes). Uncommon sense may not be prudent (as I understand "prudence") or reasonable; it may evolve from an intuition.

Intuition is not something to hastily dismiss. Nor are our intuitions necessarily right on. You may not take Carl Jung seriously, but Hegel, Husserl, Marcel, and Wojtyla offer increasing improvements over Kant's obsession with mere human reason. I know no one who lives strictly according to reason. Unfortunately, the phenomenologists are not easy reading and, thus, aren't likely be become popular reading. Uncommon sense is just that; it's uncommon, but it is not necessarily wrong.

Or right.

Yet uncommonly bad sense would be to not prepare for a threat, to go on without any concern on one's future, and to imitate the grasshopper in Aesop's fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant. Despite our deeply interconnected and interlocked personal positions in human society, we also have a serious responsibility to ourselves, our loved ones, and our fellow human beings. This responsibility requires us to use our minds and hearts collaboratively with others-- not in subjection to public mood.

Sincerely, Stan Faryna

-- Stan Faryna (info@giglobal.com), May 24, 1999.

This article ALMOST touches on the real question, which is fault tolerance. Our society has a level of fault tolerance...that which enables us to function in spite of some faults which happen daily. A payroll bug, a transit strike, a localized power outage due to a drunk driver hitting a power pole, etc. The question is how much fault tolerance do we really have before serious breakdowns occur? I'm not willing to bet my family's welfare that there is sufficient fault tolerance to prevent significant disruptions. Ergo, I prepare.

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), May 24, 1999.

Myth?????????? Sir you are a fool!

-- FLAME AWAY (BLehman202@aol.com), May 24, 1999.

Norm .......... need a little extra attention today ?????

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), May 24, 1999.

Amazing. Here we have a self professed electrician and pig farmer pointing out to Danny Hillis, computer guru extraordinaire, the error in his ways. It is indeed a strange world.

from c.s.y2k:

It is hysterically funny, in light of the voluminous evidence, that assholes like this, not only abound, but that they are published in Newsweek. Once again, the Pollyanna mantra is supported by no facts , no evidence, no nothing at all. Y2K boils down to a big failure of Hotel wake-up calls. Not even a bump in the road. This ONE sentence should clue you in to why this guy is not only a total incompetent, but a complete ass. "Most mainframes are not doing anything of earth-shattering, time- critical importance." ROTFLMAO ROTFLMAO I am quite certain that Hamasaki can easily explain why this guy is a total dolt, as he has repeated done in here, far better than I can. It is amazing that this article calls this guy a computer expert and he is so clueless about enterprise scale operations. -- Paul Milne If you live within five miles of a 7-11, you're toast.

-- a (a@a.a), May 24, 1999.

Thank you, "a". That was very apt. As an aside, there is a pretty good version of "The Ant and The Grasshopper" story on my website for anyone who is interested in it. Leaving aside looters, there are only two choices to be made vis-a-vis Y2K preparedness; I have made my choice, and it is that of the ant (soon to be the symbol for my website, incidentally). Presuming Norm has portrayed himslf honestly, it definitely appears that he is actively using the grasshopper model to inspire the choices he makes for his family. See you in 2001, Norm.

website: www.y2ksafeminnesota.com OR http://y2ksafeminnesota.hypermart.net

-- MinnesotaSmith (y2ksafeminnesota@hotmail.com), May 24, 1999.

Norm, that's assinine.

Global warming, very confusing, no consensus, too expensive.

Y2k, very confusing, no consensus, too expensive, BUT IT HAS A FIXED DEADLINE.

You can always ignore the acid rain and the F6 tornados and Cat-5+ hurricanes. They are "freaks". It's hard to ignore a final deadline. (until it passes of course and then they pass out the test scores...)

-- Gandalf (Wizard1@JRR.com), May 25, 1999.