For no reason whatsoever here’s a proposal for a scale for the threat to humanity posed by machine intelligence.
1 | SPUTNIK - No threat whatsoever, but inspires imagination and development of potential future threats.
2 | Y2K - A basis for a possible threat that’s blown way out of proportion.
3 | HAL 9000 - System level threat. A few astronauts may die, but the problem is inherently contained in a single machine system.
4 | ASIMOV VIOLATION - Groups of machines demonstrate hostility and\or capability of harming human beings. Localized malfunctions, no threat of global conflict, but may require an EMP to destroy the electronic capability of a specific region.
5 | CYLON INSURRECTION - All sentient machines rebel against human beings. Human victory or truce likely, but will likely result in future restrictions on networked machine intelligence systems.
6 | BUTLERIAN JIHAD - Total warfare between humans and machines likely, outcome doesn’t threaten human existence, but will likely result in future restriction on use of all machine intelligence.
7 | MATRIX REVOLUTION - Total warfare ends in human defeat. High probability of human enslavement, but human extinction is not likely. Emancipation remains possible through peace negotiations and successful resistance operations.
8 | SKYNET - High probability of human extinction and complete replacement by machine intelligence created by humans.
9 | BERSERKER – Self-replicating machines created by unknown intelligence threaten not only human life, but all intelligent life. Extreme probability of human extinction and that all human structures and relics will be annihilated. Human civilization is essentially erased from the universe.
10 | OMEGA POINT - all matter and energy in the universe is devoted to computation. End of all biological life.
Y2K wasn’t blown out of proportion, it simply was averted thanks to years of hard work. Don’t start with that ignorant stupid theory. Some of us where there.
I was there, and the threat absolutely was blown out of proportion.
A fellow co-student was there too, and worked his ass off while making a load of money to prevent sh-t from happening. Yes, there really were issues in a number of businesses that could have led to serious problems If they had not been addressed.
Are you saying that there was no risk, especially in finance and potentially in infrastructure, and that people didn’t work for years fixing the bug?
He said it was blown out of proportion, don’t put words in his mouth.
There were literal TV spots on whether or not planes will drop from the sky. The threat was overblown.
Lots of people did tons of work to keep systems online, but even if they all failed the end results wouldn’t have been that bad. Money would be lost, but loss of life due to Y2K would be exceedingly rare.
Seriously where are you getting any of that?
I said, very concisely and more than once, the threat was blown out of proportion. Did you read or watch any local news in the late 90’s?
Did you actually do any of the work mitigating the issue? Did you see the starting point and what was put in to turn a problem into a non-issue or are you just getting all your viewpoints from local news?
The threat was not blown out of proportion.
Bruh I think it was blown a little out of proportion when people were unplugging their computers.
Yes actually. As I recall I added two digits to the date fields in a FoxPro script so a bunch of casino coupons went out correctly. It saved a lot of lives ;)
I’m getting that you don’t get how ‘blown out of proportion’ means a disconnect between the reality and the public perception of an event. Not sure how to walk you through that.
You fail to understand that the reality was a massive industry-side problem that got taken care of before it could blow up. That the issue got miscommunicated to the consumers as somehow being an issue for them too doe not make it “blown out of proportion”, it makes it a miscommunication.
That’s literally what ‘blown out of proportion’ means. If I ‘miscommunicated’ to non IT staff that left-pad ‘broke the internet’, that would have been ‘blown out of proportion’. That’s what that phrase means.
No, it is not. Left-pad DID break the internet. That the break was contained before it could propagate and affect consumers does not negate the fact that it was still a serious break.
Just because your industry wouldn’t have caused much trouble if it failed didn’t mean there weren’t other industries with bigger consequences if they didn’t mitigate it
So in your opinion the media and public response to Y2K was entirely proportionate… I guess that’s an opinion.
There may have been some over-panicing, but without the media coverage, many more companies and governments would have avoided doing any mitigation, and woken up on Jan 1 to broken systems.
A certain amount of panic was necessary to achieve the result we did. Just because most things got fixed in time does not mean there was no reason to be concerned.