The whole world began to prepare for the millennium party early this year, with the exception of a noted conscientious objector. Arthur C. Clarke refused to participate, deploring the illiteracy of a civilisation which believes that millennia begin with the year zero. Consider the title of the book, for Barnard's sake, it's 2001. Two thousand and ONE. The global party is still a whole year away.Clarke was technically correct, of course, but way off the beam culturally. The dilemma of our civilisation is that of Faustus and Frankenstein. We thought we had met it in the flesh the morning the Enola Gay hit the bomb release over Hiroshima. But the nuclear genie was vastly overrated. Nukes are made and traded by known entities. The genie just went into a bigger bottle. But on the night of December 31, we shall finally see the Faustian parable played out, line by program line. The millennium bug is the first technological artefact to break free of the human race and assume a life of its own. No one knowsprecisely what it will do on New Year's Eve, despite the assurances of technologists and governments.They celebrate compliance, the last great buzzword of a century defined by buzzwords. Basically, it means that corporates and government agencies - which means the people who run your phone system, hold your bank account, manage intensive care units and collect your taxes - will upgrade their computer networks so that they can distinguish between 1900 and 2000.What it does not mean: that the network of networks is similarly secured. We are dealing with an entity which can reach through cyberspace and freeze computer systems, turn off runway landing lights, trip the international telephone network, make ATMs spew cash halfway around the world. No matter how compliant we make our systems, there is no guarantee that a dinky little non-compliant 386 machine connecting to the Internet from Norway will not cause a massive failure across Asia. It is the remoteness, the inscrutability and the mindlesssimplicity of the Y2K bug that makes it so frightening.The bug was born in the days of huge, slow mainframe machines, when computing power lived in prohibitively expensive data processing centres. To save on processor time, programmers left out the first two digits of the year. They saved two bytes of data per computation and left behind a monster that no one has a handle on now, thanks to the spread of legacy systems across the world and the unbelievable lack of political will at, to quote George Fernandes, "the level at which decisions are made". In the US, only two-thirds of the power grid had been checked out at the beginning of this year. Here at home, when did you first see that huge advertisement bearing Montek Singh Ahluwalia's mug? Not all that long ago.However, many industry insiders believe that the threat of Y2K is vastly overrated. They feel it was hyped up into a meal ticket for hundreds of thousands of COBOL programmers who have been put out to pasture by the introduction of newprogramming languages. Survival companies got in on the act very quickly, selling Arctic gear, nuclear bunkers and freeze-dried food for the digital winter. For a while, a noted home appliances maker was advertising even its latest toaster as Y2K compliant. People were reassured to know that they could still have toast on the table on January 1 but simultaneously, they began to suspect that they were being had.It is a fact that no responsible programmer in the first world has written non-Y2K code in the last decade. That would be very reassuring, were it not for the fact that no one knows what weird code was being written behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains, even after they were partially dismantled. The disarming thing about the Y2K bug is the element of uncertainly it introduces into every digital operation. It can bring down a jetliner as surely as a Stinger missile. The irony is that a good number of Stingers are likely to be out for the count come January 1. Most are leftovers from the Afghan conflictand their guidance chips are so old that they have no idea that the Y2K bug even exists.One welcome fact that is known about the bug: if it does wreak havoc, it will turn out to be the greatest equaliser of all time. The lower the technological level of the nation, the less damage it will suffer. Heavily networked countries like the US face the very real possibility of chaos, as failures in the telephone system spill over to compromise other sectors like banking, aviation, the power grid and, eventually, national security. The records at Amex could melt down into digital slag. The trusty and well-thumbed ledgers of the State Bank of India will be completely safe. Similarly, our power providers are inured to failure. In New York, a serious power outage produces a baby boom.But, to borrow another book title from Arthur C. Clarke, this is definitely childhood's end. For the first time, the human race is faced with a technological product that has become an independent entity. The old Victorian nightmareof machines achieving world domination could come true next month, in a way that no science-fiction writer could have possibly imagined. No one could have predicted that the monster was just a short string of code that, far from commanding a computer's processor to take over the world, just asks it for a date.
