>| ECONOMIST PREDICTS Y2K PROBLEM WILL CAUSE RECESSION
>
>*shudder* Don't know about you, but I am not quite sure that many companies
>are going to be able to fix this problem by the deadline...
i remember seeing this one a few months ago.. it's a lot less exciting than
it sounds. his basic premise is that companies that don't get Y2K fixed
ahead of time will probably survive, but only by devoting effort which
(ideally) could be devoted to improving their business. that will make
economies a bit sluggish.
the doom&gloom scenarios are a really good example of the fundamental
differences between humans and computers. left to themselves, with no
course corrections, the non-Y2K-compliant computers of the world would let
the world economy crash, and never know the difference. thing is, they're
not being left to themselves.. they have humans to monitor them.
humans (at least in general terms) have the capacity for judgement. they
also have survival instincts, and don't like to make non-survival
decisions. if you give a person the choice between A> following a
computer blindly and going out of business, and B> scrapping the computer
entirely and using an abacus, the human will take option B. even if they
do go out of business, they at least had a better shot at survival than
with A.
the idea that basic services will completely disappear is, no offense,
extremely naive. it assumes a completely digital model of reality..
there's only one way anything can be done, and if that option fails there's
no possible way to replace it.. and life just doesn't work that way.
there are an infinite number of ways to do any particular job, and the one
that dominates the market does so by out-competing all the others.
any system is vulnerable to external stressors, but a stress which kills
one system may be great for another, competing system. the worst-case
scenario of Y2K is that every major company in the world goes out of
business because they can't cope.. and their markets are taken over by
smaller, hungrier companies that had the flexibility to adapt. heaven
forbid, i'd have to get a whole new set of credit cards.. *from different
companies*.
as far as life-critical services go, one of the fundamental points of
systems design is to eliminate single-point catastrophic failures. you
don't arm, target, and launch a nuke by pushing a single button. there
are also very few systems that perform mission-critical, irreversible
operations without asking for human verification. if you're working in a
word processor, and try to quit without saving your work, the program asks
if you really want to do that.
the systems which control life-critical services do the same kind of thing,
but they get downright bitchy about letting operators do something out of
the ordinary. even if an automatic scheduling system tries to dump huge
volumes of toxic chemicals into the water supply, there's almost guaranteed
to be a panel somewhere that says, "are you sure you want to do this?"
before dumping any volume of chemicals, and "you're dumping too much, go
back and try again" if the volume falls outside a given range.
if the systems running the world were fragile enough that Y2K could
initiate global, catastrophic failures, we would have been wiped out by
typos and other sources of operator error long ago.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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