Appeared in Newsweek May, 01998

The myth of Y2K

W. Daniel 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 mid-beat. Gas lines will burst into flames and airplanes will plunge from the sky. Personally, I doubt it. Here is my version: Thousands of hotel guests will fail to get their wake up calls. Silly notices will appear in your mail. 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. After all, no one knows for sure. Isn't the safe course to assume the worst? Normally I would say yes, but I think the exaggeration is itself becoming dangerous. The truth is that society is pretty resilient, and not nearly so dependent on bug-free technology as the experts would lead you to think. Most of those mainframes are not doing anything of life-shattering time-critical importance. The checks they write can still be checked by humans before mailing them out. And most of those imbedded micro controllers do not even know what time it is, much less depend on the date 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 so fondly 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 DeeperTruth.

For Convincing Detail just mix a little millennium bug with any technology that happens to make 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. This is a guaranteed attention getter. 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. Precision suggests accuracy. Details convince.

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

Combine these two types of experts with a resourceful journalist and you get a story. Reporters like examples, and they will keep calling around until someone provides them. 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 elevator micro controllers will crash." All the expert really knows is that some industrial machines have micro controllers that keep track of whether they have received regular maintenance, but it is easy to imagine that elevators might do such a thing. If so, on January first 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. In this case "anything" would probably mean quietly sitting on the ground floor waiting for maintenance, but the image of the elevator plunging to the ground makes better copy. The fact checker calls the elevator company to see if it true. Fearing a lawsuit the elevator company says "no comment". The responsible experts are afraid of lawsuits too, so they have to agree that, yes, it is possible. The story runs. Eventually the elevator company issues a statement saying that their elevators do not have this problem, but this only reinforces the idea that some other elevators might crash. Pretty soon we are all thinking of taking the stairs on New Years day.

All of 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 the millennium bug is their first real proof. Now they know for sure that there is not somebody, somewhere who understands how it all works. This is an uncomfortable revelation, like the time you first realized that grownups could make mistakes. 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. These are unpleasant truths, but we have learned to live with them.

I took my car in to be serviced a few months ago because it was losing power at high speed. "I think the fuel mixture is wrong," I told the mechanic. He looked at me strangely, as if he were not sure if my car even had a fuel mixture. After plugging the engine into some kind of diagnostic device he shook his head and 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 assume there is someone in Detroit who knows what The Module does, but I am not so sure about my computer. Do you believe there is someone in Redmond who knows the purpose of every module in Windows 95? I don't. Sometimes my computer does what it is supposed to. Sometimes it just breaks.

I was annoyed at how much the car dealer charged me for my new module, so I exacted my revenge as I paid the bill. "This better be year-two-thousand complaint," 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, in the truest sense of the word, a myth. It is a shared falsehood that carries within it a profound truth. The truth is not that civilization will come to an end in the year 2000, but rather that civilization as we once knew it, has ended already. We are no longer in complete command of our creations. We now live with our electronic infrastructure as if it were a part of our natural environment. We have left behind that brief period of human history when we understood the world around us. 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, influenced. Something to speculate about, but never again something to control. There are no real experts, only people with partial knowledge 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.

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