[asah]

That narrative is only in the uneducated public. Every Y2K perfect of course documented its many findings and fixes.

In fact, the REASON Y2K got so much budget and attention were the early companies that started discovering the issues and alerted the others. Notables include IBM, General Motors, Citibank and American Express.

Agreed it was a nice success. We also did pretty well in paperless office, the ozone layer and acid rain, automobile and airplane safety, and the war on cancer, and now obesity and diabetes.

[IshKebab]

The public were not uneducated about this. If you remember how Y2K was presented to the public, it was ridiculously extreme - planes crashing, economies collapsing, etc. None of that happened, and not because all the bugs were fixed.

You can't fix all bugs, so if the consequences really were going to be catastrophic then you'd expect at least a handful of catastrophes to sneak through, but that didn't happen at all.

[alextingle]

> None of that happened, and not because all the bugs were fixed.

No one is in a position to assert that. We have very little idea how fragile our civilization is. Perhaps it's pretty robust, and networks of interconnected problems (like Y2K) stand no chance of snowballing out of control. Or perhaps it's really, really fragile, and surprisingly little stands between us and a profound collapse.

It's very difficult to be certain, because it's such a complicated system, and one that we can't really test to destruction.

Would all the Y2K bugs have caused a widespread systematic failure if they'd gone un-fixed? Probably not... but maybe? Just like all low-probability, high impact risks, it's very hard for us to reason about.

How much money is it wise to spend on averting the risk of giant asteroid impacts? Hard to say. Probably more than you think, though.