Y2K, WTF

As we cruised ever closer to the year 2000, there was a growing sense of anticipation everywhere. Something was about to happen.

A new millennium was a big deal! The last thousand years saw almost unimaginable change, with the Earth’s population exploding from 300 million to over 7 billion. At the start of the last millennium, the fastest way to spread ideas was to painstakingly copy everything down by hand.

By the middle of this thousand-year stretch, we were able to produce a thousand times as many words per year. By the dawn of the 21st century, we had almost left the printing press in the dust, disseminating information at the speed of light and all around the globe.

And, the speed of change itself was speeding up. More change happened in a few decades of the 20th century than in previous entire centuries, and this trend only increased as 1999 drew to a close.

In the midst of all this excitement, there was also a great deal of concern over a more technical matter. Older computer systems stored years in two digits, like using “94” to mean “1994.” This meant that there could be some confusion between, say, 1904 and 2004—both would be represented by “04.”

The concern was that certain important calculations might be messed up by this glitch. People worried that power grids would fail, causing widespread blackouts and chaos. Banks might also run the risk of losing digital financial records, and air traffic control might not be able to operate.

The Y2K problem, as it came to be called, is central to the plot of Office Space, which is among my picks for best comedy movie ever.

The movie does an excellent job of pointing out just how much attention was being paid to the upcoming potential crisis. It’s almost tough to explain how powerful the phenomenon was, and how ubiquitous it was, too, so I’m grateful for Office Space for documenting this moment, albeit in a fictionalized setting.

As it turned out, all the preparations that governments and businesses around the world took paid off. There was no widespread chaos, just a few minor glitches here and there. I don’t think I personally experienced even a single incident caused by Y2K.

How did we get this so wrong?

There were a few factors at play, not the least of which was all the media hype around the event. As usual, advertisers were in the business of selling ads, and they weren’t interested in selling reality.

Meanwhile, human beings did what humans have often done in a situation of potential crisis: overthink everything. Would our savings accounts be wiped out? Would traffic lights stop working? In those fairly early internet days, was it even possible to find any good information about Y2K?

One takeaway for me is that a cataclysm that everyone knows is coming might never arrive after all. This seems trivial and trite, since it’s pretty obvious, but identifying and talking about a potential problem is surely the first step toward preventing such a problem.

In today’s ultra-connected age, we have billions more people talking to one another than in 1999. These conversations include a lot of… shall we say, grievances, that point out something that might go wrong without offering any kind of tangible solution. Now, it can be really annoying whenever someone does this, but there is a time and place for it, and that time and place is to point out problems that might threaten our entire system of existence.

I don’t think AGI is going to become our overlords or become a perverse paperclip maximizer, but I mostly think that because so many people are raising alarms of this potential outcome.

In a similar vein, climate change is a very real threat that is currently very clearly on the rise, threatening much of life on the planet and causing economic turmoil. Yet, I’m optimistic that this problem can be solved, largely because so many people are now aware of the dangers.

Please don’t leave with the impression that I think just pointing these issues out is enough to address the very big problems! We need to do far more than we’re doing on both of the things I mentioned, and we need our very best thinkers to work on both. But the whole process begins by calling attention to a potential crisis, and that’s incredibly valuable.