WE CAN ONLY BLAME OURSELVES FOR Y2K NIGHTMARE

William Raspberry June 2, 1998

WASHINGTON -- I don't know enough about the way computers and computer networks do what they do to guess what is likely to happen when Dec. 31, 1999, gives way to the year 2000. Will we have a mere multifaceted disaster--like, say, a simultaneous train derailment, power failure and dam break? Or will there be a full-scale catastrophe?

I no longer believe, as I used to, that we will avoid the calamity that the year 2000--Y2K--is widely predicted to bring us. I used to imagine teams of computer programmers working feverishly in their futuristic labs, discarding one flawed approach after another, sweating like Greg Morris in a "Mission Impossible" episode, and finally--just in the nick of time--rushing out with the magic bullet solution. I thought of it as a sort of friendly virus that would worm its way into the bowels of every computer program in the world, make the necessary adjustments and then consume itself. Maybe they would code-name it "Burp."

It's easy enough to think of Y2K in movie thriller terms since the flaw that menaces us is precisely of the sort scriptwriters dream up. Pioneering programmers, knowing better but driven by the need for speed and the certainty that "somebody" would fix it later on, write programs that record years in space-saving, cost-cutting two-digit form--84, not 1984. And now these truncated dates are embedded deep in the inner workings of programs that do everything from delivering Social Security checks to guiding airliners.

But the solutions, I now imagine, will be piecemeal, temporary, ad hoc and inadequate--with nothing of the clean elegance we always think computers will produce. Two incidents feed my pessimism. In one, my car battery died with my power-operated windows in the open position. In the other, the cafeteria cash register went on the fritz, and the company had to give the food away. Two innovations that were supposed to simplify our lives had complicated them instead, while leaving no possibility of going back to the old ways. You could neither crank up the windows nor ring up a hamburger sale by hand.

What, I wonder, will we do when computers that can't tell the difference between 1900 and 2000 make it impossible for supermarkets to run cash registers or for ATMs to deliver on requests for cash or for payrolls to print and deliver paychecks?

And what will we do when, as is clearly among the possibilities, things get a great deal worse than that?

Futurist Robert Theobald tells me that most countries in the world haven't even begun working on the Y2K problem, and that many of those that have can only guess at the scope of the difficulties. "The complex web of telecommunications will be seriously harmed," he guesses, "and communications between some countries may be broken. Air and sea travel will be under serious threat."

Police operations, hospital equipment, banking transactions, security measures of all sorts could be in jeopardy. It is altogether possible, says Theobald, that governments could collapse.

His point is not the technological one of how to reprogram the computers but the human and civic question of how we will react to the coming disaster/catastrophe.

"People will either see it as a natural phenomenon like an ice storm or hurricane, where we all draw together, or as a we/they phenomenon which divides us. In the latter case, massive civil disorder is all too likely. I know of a well-informed person who is leaving New York City for New Mexico for this very reason."

The bigger lesson for Theobald, though, is the brittleness of the social and governmental systems we have created--encased in needlessly rigid rules and safeguards to keep us from cheating but, by that same token, inaccessible to ordinary citizens when things go badly. What is needed, he insists, is the gradual replacement--at least the augmentation--of these systems by more resilient structures that withstand the inevitable shocks so that we will no longer be "dependent on large-scale systems that we do not control."

And perhaps a backup, detachable crank for my electrically operated car windows.