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I'm a skeptic about the millennium bug.
For people who don't know, a bunch of computer scientists worked round the clock to change computer dates from 2 digit years ('99) to 4 digital years (1999).
The explanation I've read for that is that computers would have otherwise reached 01/01/00 and thought it was 1900 and stopped working. Computers aren't just laptops and PCs but are in anything electronic... so planes would fall from the sky & hospital equipment would stop working... an actual human catastrophe rather than just your high score being wiped on your favourite PC game.
I think this is silly. It humanises the computers way too much. Even in 2023, let alone in 2000, AI is not at that level where it wakes up one day thinks "not even my ancestors should be born yet" and has an existential crisis, causing itself to wipe out because of a logic gap.
Maybe in the year 10000.
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_ashleyartsy_
If I remember right I think the way they thought planes would stop working and the crazy stuff like that was just a widespread myth that people were believing. My dad is an IT guy and was at the time, they worked nonstop to change the numbers because it would more so cause a problem in the systems. Stuff would revert back to 1900 and corrupt a lot of data. I gotta ask him again to refresh my memory tho. But I do know IT people weren't worried about stuff shutting down at least from my dad's perspective.
That makes more sense. So it wasn't the computer 'thinking', it was the corruption of files. Not sure how it'd work but I guess that's a tech thing?
I remember the rumours about the crazy stuff cos I said I didn't care if my PC died, it was fun but there was other fun stuff to do. Girl I was talking to said the other stuff which... obviously that'd matter a lot more.
Maybe it's like a personifying of the tech being corrupted. I don't like the language of 'it will think it's 1900', it can't actually think anything at all.
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