Was Y2K a real genuine threat to human existence that was averted by the blood sweat and tears of IT departments across the globe?

I imagine that if your bank had taken 100 years' worth of interest from your savings account in Jan2000 instead of crediting it with one month's, you might have been a bit cheesed off.
Having spent over a decade in Finance IT, I can tell you that there is rarely "a" system. It will be a patchwork of systems developed over time, and a change to any one of them requires the whole flow for any impacted transaction type to be robustly regression tested. Identifying all the instances of dodgy date coding and fixing them in a way that ensures that only compatible data is passed between systems in the meantime is very fiddly, time consuming and expensive.

It was real. Interesting times!

No one serious was.... credulous idiots might have believed it though.

IT departments did fix "planes" and all the software and computer systems used in air traffic control, and so on ad infinitum.

Not sure what your problem is.

Since when does not "totally trouble free" mean global societal collapse? And that was in April 1998, so a year and half or so of work done after that, which meant that most systems were sorted. There were some issues, nothing that meant any real or lasting harm, or that caused trouble on a global societal level.

But, you are stuck in a catch-22 about this issue. I can see it's important to you to feel that you were somehow hoodwinked by IT workers. It's certainly fascinating to see the thought processes in action here.

I understood exactly what you meant and that previous poster should have just asked rather than being nasty and implying you condoned mass slaughter by the atomic bombs.

it had been theorised some years before the bomb was built that a nuclear fission explosion would release so much energy that the atmosphere would ignite and instantly eliminate all life on Earth. It was explained in the very popular film “Oppenheimer” so it is now fairly common knowledge.

Not sure of the details of the big scare over the large hadron collider, but it was something to do with a fear that an uncontrollable chain reaction would be set off which would blow up the planet.

So you clearly gave these as similar examples of fears of apocalyptic events being set off by new technology. Though I would say that these two were theories that didn’t actually prove to be true in real life, but Y2K was a very real issue that would have caused some pretty catastrophic events if it wasn’t for a great deal of hard work being done to fix the problem.

Have people walked on the Moon, OP?

Just want to get a sense of the ballpark we're in.

I’m a data scientist that still
sometimes works with pre-y2k datasets. We still have people who make errors because they did not account for the date structuring. It’s not life or death. It’s someone getting results like people who are 150 years old and we notice it and go back and fix the code.

Aye pet.

As a risk manager i always remind people that it is better to get the process right first time, as adjustments, reviews, feedback etc to a process are time consuming and costly!

https://time.com/5752129/y2k-bug-history/

Obvious troll is trolling!
My first job was y2k compliance, it was tedious, assessing 200+ bits of software, about half of it needed patching or upgrading/replacing. The reason noting serious happened was because people like me spent the previous years making sure everything was compliant or replaced. It wasn't difficult but was an awful lot of work.

But "we" didn't give tech companies loads of money - companies used their in-house IT experts to do the fixes over a period of many years, and if some outside tech experts were called in to some government departments in miscellaneous countries, or extra staff were paid to do the overtime, so what. It needed to be fixed, and it was fixed.

It is completely different from the AI revolution occurring now, and those in the know's opinions on what may lie ahead and should be averted.

An apocalypse that might I remind you never happened, never even nearly happened, despite countries like eg DR Congo doing fuck all to avert it.

Oh, the Congo, you say? How do you know who did what where?

I lived under a flightpath then and it was certainly a concern for me.

I was definitely born, and I definitely remember it. I can't speak for what messaging was around in every country in the world then, though.

I don't agree. People involved in AI development who have serious qualms are speaking up, and urging caution, based on what they know and the potentialities they can already see - which is the humane and right thing to do.

The company I worked for started preparing for this in about 1993 - and incidentally, it wasn't an IT department that was working on it, it was the R&D engineers who developed the hardware that software ran on as well as the software. All the new systems from about that date never had a problem because the issue had been addressed - it was the legacy systems and backward compatability that caused the problem.

I don't want us to have to keep on doing this.

You clearly aren’t going to be doing anything to fix ‘this’ 🤣🙄

It’s good the people warning about the Y2K bug did so when there was still time to do something about it. Some countries, like DR Congo were not heavily computerised at the time and what they had was often bought from external companies who were working on the bug for all their customers.

After Y2K we (developers and sw managers) were still fixing some of the less critical systems that hadn’t been fixed in time and started behaving weirdly.