It was the perfect fable for our time: HAL recast as a billion tiny bugs, his omnipotent malevolence replaced by our own innocent oversight. Technology had become so all-encompassing and incomprehensible, the fable began, that we had unwittingly lost control of it. So the smallest thing, our human habit of hiply referring to years by the last two digits, was going to topple this electronic pack of cards, sending planes crashing to the ground, nukes leaping from their silos, electricity to a standstill and all of humanity back to a time much earlier than the 1900 our computers would believe it...
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