Time to Pay Attention by Peter de Jager

Finally, the endless wearisome debate on whether or not Y2K is a real problem is over. As you read this, the stark reality of Y2K is making itself known around the world.

If we are facing technological trauma, despite earnest and sincere warnings, then we have only ourselves to blame. If we've muddled through or shuffled around the crisis, we were lucky. Considering how late many of us started remediation, competence and skill had nothing to do with either outcome. Yesterday, Y2K cost us hundreds of billions of dollars to fix. Today and tomorrow, it holds us captive as we await the outcome of those efforts. Over the foreseeable future, it will cost additional billions to remedy the problems we've overlooked and the new ones we've introduced. Then, of course, we have to endure the inevitable endless litany of lawsuits. These are not predictions; I'm merely describing what has already happened and what is waiting in the wings. What was the ultimate source of this debacle? We could argue that the high cost of early computer memory forced us to use two-digit years even though we knew they would fail us in the future. We could also argue that resistance to and denial of bad news prevented us from fixing it in time to avoid the vast majority of the costs. These arguments have some merit, but they sound more like after-the-fact rationalizations than the real reason we placed ourselves in this situation. The real reason is simpler, makes no excuses, is less than complimentary, and is naturally avoided whenever possible. The real reason Y2K became a reality is that we had no clue what we were doing. We were making it up as we went along. In other words, the real reason for Y2K, is our old enemy "ignorance." 'What sort of industry is the IT sector that it can make such a simple and massive blunder so early in its career?' asked William Reville, a director of microscopy at UCC in The Irish Times last fall. The answer, of course, is that it's a perfectly normal and average industry. Our biggest blunders are always made in our formative years, when ignorance outweighs knowledge. The image that keeps coming to my mind is the Sorcerer's Apprentice in Walt Disney's Fantasia. The apprentice is faced with a simple enough task--gather water--and a technology that is readily at hand. He calls it 'magic'; we call ours 'computers.' With no thought as to how he will stop the process once enough water is gathered, the apprentice begins his little experiment--and meets with the inevitably disastrous results. The lesson here is not that technology is harmful; after all, the sorcerer returns and--using the same technology-- corrects all the problems caused by the over-enthusiastic apprentice. The lesson is that there are risks associated with creating a dependence on something we don't fully understand. This, however, is the real world. We can't hold off doing something until we know how to do it. We must make mistakes in order to learn from them. And we have to do it alone--there are no sorcerers around to help us when the water keeps rising and we can't stop it. If we had paid more attention to the risks associated with computer applications scheduled to expire on a particular date, then we would have put safeguards in place to help minimize the consequences. But we didn't. Instead, we have a rather expensive object lesson in hand. What to do with it? We could look around for other new emerging technologies, those that, as Mr. Reville puts it, are early in their careers--especially those that, like computer applications, affect millions of people. Once found, we could explore the possible massive blunders they might generate, asking ourselves if the potential consequences of those blunders would justify the expected benefits. We could do that. But, of course, that type of thinking is too grandiose for most of us. Perhaps a simpler strategy would be merely to remember that, while ignorance itself is not a sin, combining it with arrogance or hubris results in nasty and unexp

-- Jean Wasp (jean@sonic.net), January 02, 2000