Failing the test

The second woe has passed; behold, the third woe is soon to come.

Revelation 11: 14

Today is the first day of a new millennium, and the date on my laptop reads a comforting 01/01/00.

Outside, the misty prickling rain that for England marked the passing of the twentieth century has given way to a calm, fresh-start sort of a morning. A watery sun presides over a silent, clean-washed landscape, like a painter who has prepared her canvas, laid out her tools neatly and methodically, and is taking a last deep breath and a moment’s reverent silence before setting to work on a new creation.

Yesterday also marked a minor defining moment in my own life, for reasons I won’t trouble you with, but it drew a neat symbolic line under an otherwise rather turbulent year. Suffice it to say that I, like many people across the globe (at least, those without hangovers), am sitting here in the wintry sunshine, calm and centred, waiting for the new beginning.

The year 2001 bug

Yet it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Had the soothsayers had their way, midnight would have ushered in a more eerie calm, punctuated only by the wail of sirens, as the world’s computers ground to a halt and civilization collapsed in an embarrassed heap. Happily, the worst of the much-touted millennium bug, which was to perplex date-calculating software by appearing to make 99 + 1 = 0, has failed to cause the damage many people feared it would, and we can sleep soundly in our beds a little longer.

But the year 2000 bug, according to the soothsayers, was really only the beginning of the end. If we are to believe Arthur C. Clarke, we have very little time left before computers start locking us out of our spaceships and intelligent machines take over the world. What we should be afraid of on this bright new year’s morning is apparently not Y2K but what we might call the year 2001 bug – for that is the year in which, according to Clarke’s and Kubrik’s haunting 2001 – A Space Odyssey, the electronic brain of the computer known as HAL 9000 will take cold logic to its worst extreme and commit murder.

Copyright © 2004 Cyberlife Research Ltd.
Last modified: 06/04/04