[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation?
The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social
Transformation?
by John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley, Myron
Kellner-Rogers
version in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) Download Acrobat
Editor's Note: This is a draft of an article scheduled for publication
in the October 1998 issue of THE FUTURIST. Due to the
time-sensitive nature of the material, it was posted here to create
greater awareness of the issue as well as elicit comments and questions
before final publication. Please send your comments and questions to the
authors at [email protected] and the editors at
[email protected] .
The Millenial sun will first rise over human civilization in the
independent republic of Kiribati, a group of some thirty low
lying coral islands in the Pacific Ocean that straddle the equator
and the International Date Line, halfway between Hawaii and
Australia. This long awaited sunrise marks the dawn of the year
2000, and quite possibly, the onset of unheralded disruptions
in life as we know it in many parts of the globe. Kiribati's 81,000
Micronesians may observe nothing different about this
dawn; they only received TV in 1989. However, for those who live in
a world that relies on satellites, air, rail and ground
transportation, manufacturing plants, electricity, heat, telephones,
or TV, when the calendar clicks from '99 to '00, we will
experience a true millennial shift. As the sun moves westward on
January 1, 2000, as the date shifts silently within millions
of computerized systems, we will begin to experience our
computer-dependent world in an entirely new way. We will finally
see the extent of the networked and interdependent processes we have
created. At the stroke of midnight, the new millenium
heralds the greatest challenge to modern society we have yet to face
as a planetary community. Whether we experience this as
chaos or social transformation will be influenced by what we do
immediately.
We are describing the year 2000 problem, known as Y2K (K signifying
1000.) Nicknamed at first "The Millennial Bug,"
increasing sensitivity to the magnitude of the impending crisis has
escalated it to "The Millennial Bomb." The problem
begins as a simple technical error. Large mainframe computers more
than ten years old were not programmed to handle a
four digit year. Sitting here now, on the threshold of the year
2000, it seems incomprehensible that computer programmers
and microchip designers didn't plan for it. But when these billions
of lines of computer code were being written, computer
memory was very expensive. Remember when a computer only had 16
kilobytes of RAM? To save storage space, most
programmers allocated only two digits to a year. 1993 is '93' in
data files, 1917 is '17.' These two-digit dates exist on millions
of files used as input to millions of applications. (The era in
which this code was written was described by one programming
veteran as "the Wild West." Programmers did whatever was required to
get a product up and working; no one even thought
about standards.)
The same thing happened in the production of microchips as recently
as three years ago. Microprocessors and other
integrated circuits are often just sophisticated calculators that
count and do math. They count many things: fractions of
seconds, days, inches, pounds, degrees, lumens, etc. Many chips that
had a time function designed into them were only
structured for this century. And when the date goes from '99 to '00
both they and the legacy software that has not been fixed
will think it is still the 20th century -- not 2000, but 1900.
Peter de Jager, who has been actively studying the problem and its
implications since 1991, explains the computer math
calculation: "I was born in 1955. If I ask the computer to calculate
how old I am today, it subtracts 55 from 98 and announces
that I'm 43. . . But what happens in the year 2000? The computer
will subtract 55 from 00 and will state that I am minus 55
years old. This error will affect any calculation that produces or
uses time spans. . . If you want to sort by date (e.g., 1965,
1905, 1966), the resulting sequence would be 1905, 1965, 1966.
However, if you add in a date record such as 2015, the
computer, which reads only the last two digits of the date, sees 05,
15, 65, 66 and sorts them incorrectly. These are just two
types of calculations that are going to produce garbage."1
The calculation problem explains why the computer system at Marks &
Spencer department store in London recently
destroyed tons of food during the process of doing a long term
forecast. The computer read 2002 as 1902. Instead of four more
years of shelf life, the computer calculated that this food was
ninety-six years old. It ordered it thrown out.2
A similar problem happened recently in the U.S. at the warehouse of
a freeze dried food manufacturer. But Y2K is not about
wasting good food. Date calculations affect millions more systems
than those that deal with inventories, interest rates, or
insurance policies. Every major aspect of our modern infrastructure
has systems and equipment that rely on such
calculations to perform their functions. We are dependent on
computerized systems that contain date functions to effectively
manage defense, transportation, power generation, manufacturing,
telecommunications, finance, government, education,
healthcare. The list is longer, but the picture is clear. We have
created a world whose efficient functioning in all but the
poorest and remotest areas is dependent on computers. It doesn't
matter whether you personally use a computer, or that most
people around the world don't even have telephones. The world's
economic and political infrastructures rely on computers.
And not isolated computers. We have created dense networks of
reliance around the globe. We are networked together for
economic and political purposes. Whatever happens in one part of the
network has an impact on other parts of the network.
We have created not only a computer-dependent society, but an
interdependent planet.
We already have frequent experiences with how fragile these systems
are, and how failure cascades through a networked
system. While each of these systems relies on millions of lines of
code that detail the required processing, they handle their
routines in serial fashion. Any next step depends on the preceding
step. This serial nature makes systems, no matter their
size, vulnerable to even the slightest problem anywhere in the
system. In 1990, ATT's long distance system experienced
repeated failures. At that time, it took two million lines of
computer code to keep the system operational. But these millions of
lines of code were brought down by just three lines of faulty code.
And these systems are lean; redundancies are eliminated in the name
of efficiency. This leanness also makes the system
highly vulnerable. In May of this year, 90% of all pagers in the
U.S. crashed for a day or longer because of the failure of one
satellite. Late in 1997, the Internet could not deliver email to the
appropriate addresses because bad information from their
one and only central source corrupted their servers.
Compounding the fragility of these systems is the fact that we can't
see the extent of our interconnectedness. The networks
that make modern life possible are masked by the technology. We only
see the interdependencies when the relationships are
disrupted -- when a problem develops elsewhere and we notice that we
too are having problems. When Asian markets failed
last year, most U.S. businesses denied it would have much of an
impact on our economy. Only recently have we felt the extent
to which Asian economic woes affect us directly. Failure in one part
of a system always exposes the levels of
interconnectedness that otherwise go unnoticed�we suddenly see how
our fates are linked together. We see how much we
are participating with one another, sustaining one another.
Modern business is completely reliant on networks. Companies have
vendors, suppliers, customers, outsourcers (all, of
course, managed by computerized data bases.) For Y2K, these highly
networked ways of doing business create a terrifying
scenario. The networks mean that no one system can protect itself
from Y2K failures by just attending to its own internal
systems. General Motors, which has been working with extraordinary
focus and diligence to bring their manufacturing plants
up to Year 2000 compliance, (based on their assessment that they
were facing catastrophe,) has 100,000 suppliers worldwide.
Bringing their internal systems into compliance seems nearly
impossible, but what then do they do with all those vendors who
supply parts? GM experiences production stoppages whenever one key
supplier goes on strike. What is the potential number
of delays and shutdowns possible among 100,000 suppliers?
The nature of systems and our history with them paints a chilling
picture of the Year 2000. We do not know the extent of the
failures, or how we will be affected by them. But we do know with
great certainty that as computers around the globe respond
or fail when their calendars record 2000, we will see clearly the
extent of our interdependence. We will see the ways in which
we have woven the modern world together through our technology.
What, me worry?
Until quite recently, it's been difficult to interest most people in
the Year 2000 problem. Those who are publicizing the
problem (the Worldwide Web is the source of the most extensive
information on Y2K,) exclaim about the general lack of
awareness, or even the deliberate blindness that greets them. In our
own investigation among many varieties of organizations
and citizens, we've noted two general categories of response. In the
first category, people acknowledge the problem but view it
as restricted to a small number of businesses, or a limited number
of consequences. People believe that Y2K affects only a few
industries�primarily finance and insurance�seemingly because they
deal with dates on policies and accounts. Others note
that their organization is affected by Y2K, but still view it as a
well-circumscribed issue that is being addressed by their
information technology department. What's common to these comments
is that people hold Y2K as a narrowly-focused,
bounded problem. They seem oblivious to the networks in which they
participate, or to the systems and interconnections of
modern life.
The second category of reactions reveals the great collective faith
in technology and science. People describe Y2K as a
technical problem, and then enthusiastically state that human
ingenuity and genius always finds a way to solve these type of
problems. Ecologist David Orr has noted that one of the fundamental
beliefs of our time is that technology can be trusted to
solve any problem it creates.3 If a software engineer goes on TV
claiming to have created a program that can correct all
systems, he is believed. After all, he's just what we've been
expecting.
And then there is the uniqueness of the Year 2000 problem. At no
other time in history have we been forced to deal with a
deadline that is absolutely non-negotiable. In the past, we could
always hope for a last minute deal, or rely on round-the-clock
bargaining, or pray for an eleventh hour savior. We have never had
to stare into the future knowing the precise date when the
crisis would materialize. In a bizarre fashion, the inevitability of
this confrontation seems to add to people's denial of it. They
know the date when the extent of the problem will surface, and
choose not to worry about it until then.
However, this denial is quickly dissipating. Information on Y2K is
expanding exponentially, matched by an escalation in
adjectives used to describe it. More public figures are speaking
out. This is critically important. With each calendar tick of
this time, alternatives diminish and potential problems grow. We
must develop strategies for preparing ourselves at all levels
to deal with whatever Y2K presents to us with the millennium dawn.
What we know about Y2K
a technological problem that cannot be solved by technology
the first-ever, non-negotiable deadline
a systemic crisis that no one can solve alone
a crisis that transcends boundaries and hierarchies
an opportunity to evoke greater capacity from individuals and
organizations
an opportunity to simplify and redesign major systems
Figure 1
The Y2K problem, really
We'd like to describe in greater detail the extent of Y2K. As a
global network of interrelated consequences, it begins at the
center with the technical problem, legacy computer codes and
embedded microchips. (see Figure One) For the last thirty
years thousands of programmers have been writing billions of lines
of software code for the computers on which the world's
economy and society now depend. Y2K reporter Ed Meagher describes
"old, undocumented code written in over 2500 different
computer languages and executed on thousands of different hardware
platforms being controlled by hundreds of different
operating systems . . . [that generate] further complexity in the
form of billions of six character date fields stored in millions
of databases that are used in calculations."4 The Gartner Group, a
computer-industry research group, estimates that
globally, 180 billion lines of software code will have to be
screened.5 Peter de Jager notes that it is not unusual for a company
to have more than 100,000,000 lines of code--the IRS, for instance,
has at least eighty million lines. The Social Security
Administration began working on its thirty million lines of code in
1991. After five years of work, in June, 1996, four
hundred programmers had fixed only six million lines. The IRS has
88,000 programs on 80 mainframe computers to debug.
By the end of last year they had cleaned up 2,000 programs.6 Capers
Jones, head of Software Productivity Research, a firm
that tracks programmer productivity, estimates that finding, fixing
and testing all Y2K-affected software would require over
700,000 person-years.7 Programmers have been brought out of
retirement and are receiving extraordinary wages and
benefits to stick with this problem, but we are out of time. There
aren't nearly enough programmers nor hours remaining
before January 1, 2000.
Also at the center of this technical time bomb are the embedded
microprocessors. There are somewhat over a billion of these
hardware chips located in systems worldwide. They sustain the
world's manufacturing and engineering base. They exist in
traffic lights, elevators, water, gas, and electricity control
systems. They're in medical equipment and military and navigation
systems. America's air traffic control system is dependent upon
them. They're located in the track beds of railroad systems
and in the satellites that circle the earth. Global
telecommunications are heavily dependent on them. Modern cars contain
about two dozen microprocessors. The average American comes in
contact with seventy microprocessors before noon every
day. Many of these chips aren't date sensitive, but a great number
are, and engineers looking at long ago installed systems
don't know for sure which is which. To complicate things further,
not all chips behave the same. Recent tests have shown that
two chips of the same model installed in two different computers but
performing the same function are not equally sensitive to
the year-end problem. One shuts down and the other doesn't.
It is impossible to locate all of these chips in the remaining
months, nor can we replace all those that are identified. Those
more than three years old are obsolete and are probably not
available in the marketplace. The solution in those cases is to
redesign and remanufacture that part of the system -- which often
makes starting over with new equipment the best option.
That is why some companies are junking their computer systems and
spending millions, even hundreds of millions, to replace
everything. It at least ensures that their internal systems work.
At issue is time, people, money, and the nature of systems. These
technical problems are exacerbated by government and
business leaders who haven't yet fully understood the potential
significance of this issue for their own companies, to say
nothing of the greater economic implications. The U.S. leads all
other developed nations in addressing this issue, minimally
by six to nine months. Yet in a recent survey of American corporate
chief information officers, 70% of them expressed the
belief that even their companies would not be completely prepared
for Y2K. Additionally, 50% of them acknowledged that they
would not fly during January 2000. If America is the global leader
in Y2K efforts, these CIO comments are indeed sobering.
The economic impacts for the global economy are enormous and
unknown. The Gartner Group projects that the total cost of
dealing with Y2K worldwide will be somewhere between $300 billion to
$600 billion -- and these are only direct costs
associated with trying to remedy the problem. (These estimates keep
rising every quarter now.) The Office of Management
and Budget (OMB), in a recently released Quarterly Report, estimated
total government Y2K expense at $3.9 billion. This
figure was based only on federal agency estimates; the OMB warned
that this estimate might be as much as 90% too low
considering the increasing labor shortage and expected growing
remediation costs as January 1, 2000 looms nearer. And in
June of this year, it was announced that federal agencies had
already spent five billion dollars. Of twenty-four agencies,
fifteen reported being behind schedule.
These numbers don't consider the loss of output caused by diverting
resources to forestall this crisis. In more and more
businesses, expenditures for R&D and modernization are being
diverted to Y2K budgets. Business Week in March of 1998
estimated that the Year 2000 economic damage alone would be $119
billion. When potential lawsuits and secondary effects
are added to this -- people suing over everything from stalled
elevators to malfunctioning nuclear power plants -- the cost
easily could be over $1 trillion.
But these problems and estimates don't begin to account for the
potential impact of Y2K. The larger significance of this bomb
becomes apparent when we consider the next circle of the global
network-- the organizational relationships that technology
makes possible.
Who works with whom?
The global economy is dependent upon computers both directly and
indirectly. Whether it's your PC at home, the workstation
on a local area network, or the GPS or mobile telephone that you
carry, all are integral parts of larger networks where
computers are directly connected together. As we've learned, failure
in a single component can crash the whole system; that
system could be an automobile, a train, an aircraft, an electric
power plant, a bank, a government agency, a stock exchange, an
international telephone system, the air traffic control system. If
every possible date-sensitive hardware and software bug
hasn't been fixed in a larger system, just one programming glitch or
one isolated chip potentially can bring down the whole
thing.
While there isn't enough time or technical people to solve the Y2K
problem before the end of next year, we might hope that
critical aspects of our infrastructure are tackling this problem
with extreme diligence. But this isn't true. America's electric
power industry is in danger of massive failures, as described in
Business Week's February '98 cover story on Y2K. They
report that "electric utilities are only now becoming aware that
programmable controllers -- which have replaced mechanical
relays in virtually all electricity-generating plants and control
rooms -- may behave badly or even freeze up when 2000
arrives. Many utilities are just getting a handle on the problem."
It's not only nuclear power plants that are the source of
concern, although problems there are scary enough. In one Year 2000
test, notes Jared S.Wermiel, leader of the Y2K effort
at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the security computer at a
nuclear power plant failed by opening vital areas that are
normally locked. Given the complexity and the need to test, "it
wouldn't surprise me if certain plants find that they are not
Year 2000-ready and have to shut down."8
Other electric utility analysts paint a bleaker picture. Rick
Cowles, who reports on the electric utility industry, said at the
end of February: "Not one electric company [that he had talked to]
has started a serious remediation effort on its embedded
controls. Not one. Yes, there's been some testing going on, and a
few pilot projects here and there, but for the most part it is
still business-as-usual, as if there were 97 months to go, not 97
weeks.9 After attending one industry trade show, Cowle
stated that, "Based on what I learned at DistribuTECH '98, I am
convinced there is a 100% chance that a major portion of the
domestic electrical infrastructure will be lost as a result of the
Year 2000 computer and embedded systems problem. The
industry is fiddling whilst the infrastructure burns." 10
The Federal Aviation Administration is also very vulnerable but
quite optimistic. "We're on one hand working to get those
computers Year 2000 compliant, but at the same time we're working on
replacing those computers," said Paul Takemoto, a
spokesman for the FAA in early '98. At the twenty Air Route Traffic
Control Centers, there is a host computer and a backup
system. All forty of these machines --mid-'80s vintage IBM 3083
mainframes--are affected. And then there are the satellites
with embedded chips, individual systems in each airplane, and air
traffic control systems around the globe. Lufthansa already
has announced it will not fly its aircraft during the first days of
2000.
Who else is affected?
But the interdependency problem extends far beyond single
businesses, or even entire industries. Indirect relationships
extend like tentacles into many other networks, creating the
potential for massive disruptions of service.
Let's hope that your work organization spends a great deal of money
and time to get its entire information system compliant.
You know yours is going to function. But on the second of January
2000 the phone calls start. It's your banker. "There's
been a problem," he says. They've lost access to your account
information and until they solve the problem and get the backup
loaded on the new system, they are unable to process your payroll.
"We don't have any idea how long it will take," the
president says.
Then someone tells you that on the news there's a story that that
the whole IRS is down and that they can neither accept nor
process tax information. Social Security, Federal Housing,
Welfare�none of these agencies are capable of issuing checks
for the foreseeable future. Major airlines aren't flying, waiting to
see if there is still integrity in the air traffic control
system. And manufacturing across the country is screeching to a halt
because of failures in their supply chain. (After years
of developing just in time (JIT) systems, there is no inventory on
hand�suppliers have been required to deliver parts as
needed. There is no slack in these systems to tolerate even minor
delivery problems.) Ground and rail transport have been
disrupted, and food shortages appear within three to six days in
major metropolises. Hospitals, dealing with the failure of
medical equipment, and the loss of shipments of medicine, are forced
to deny non-essential treatment, and in some cases are
providing essential care in pre-technical ways.
It's a rolling wave of interdependent failures. And it reaches
across the country and the world to touch people who, in most
cases, didn't know they were linked to others. Depending on what
systems fail, very few but strategically placed failures would
initiate a major economic cascade. Just problems with power
companies and phone systems alone would cause real havoc.
(This spring, a problem in ATT rendered all credit card machines
useless for a day. How much revenue was lost by
businesses?) If only twenty percent of businesses and government
agencies crash at the same time, major failures would
ensue.
In an interdependent system, solving most of the problem is no
solution. As Y2K reporter Ed Meagher describes:
It is not enough to solve simply "most of these problems." The
integration of these systems requires that we
solve virtually all of them. Our ability as an economy and as a
society to deal with disruptions and breakdowns
in our critical systems is minuscule. Our worst case scenarios
have never envisioned multiple, parallel
systemic failures. Just in time inventory has led to just in
time provisioning. Costs have been squeezed out of
all of our critical infrastructure systems repeatedly over time
based on the ubiquity and reliability of these
integrated systems. The human factor, found costly, slow, and
less reliable has been purged over time from our
systems. Single, simple failures can be dealt with; complex,
multiple failures have been considered too remote
a possibility and therefore too expensive to plan for. 11
The city of New York began to understand this last September. The
governor of New York State banned all nonessential IT
projects to minimize the disruption caused by the year 2000 bomb
after reading a detailed report that forecasts the
millennium will throw New York City into chaos, with power supplies,
schools, hospitals, transport, and the finance sector
likely to suffer severe disruption. Compounding the city's Y2K risks
is the recent departure of the head of its year 2000
project to a job in the private sector.12
But of course the anticipated problems extend far beyond U.S.
shores. In February, the Bangkok Post reported that Phillip
Dodd, a Unysis Y2K expert, expects that upward of 70% of the
businesses in Asia will fail outright or experience severe
hardship because of Y2K. The Central Intelligence Agency supports
this with their own analysis: "We're concerned about
the potential disruption of power grids, telecommunications and
banking services, among other possible fallout, especially in
countries already torn by political tensions."13
A growing number of assessments of this kind have led Dr. Edward
Yardeni, the chief economist of Deutsche Morgan
Grenfell, to keep raising the probability of a deep global recession
in 2000-2001 as the result of Y2K. His present estimate of
the potential for such a recession now hovers at about 70%, up from
40% at the end of 1997.14
How might we respond?
(To be continued...)
<http://www.wfs.org/year2k.htm>