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And while taking the stairs may be good for your heart, you won't have to do it for fear the elevator will fall--another dire bit of misinformation making the Y2K rounds. "An elevator doesn't need to know the date to go up and down, so we never put date-sensitive controls in there," says Peter Kowalchuk, a spokesman for Otis Elevator Co. Other major elevator makers have issued similar disclaimers.
In fact, fewer than 5% of the chips embedded into things like elevators and medical devices are at risk for Y2K foul-ups, says Jim Duggan, research director for the Year 2000 program at the Gartner Group. That's still a lot of chips to be checked, but even many of the suspect ones are programmed with manual overrides or "soft-landing" outcomes where safety is an issue. (Nonetheless, the Gartner Group estimates that litigation costs over Y2K service and product failures, both real and imagined, could soar to $1 trillion or more.) Duggan's forecast for the impact of Jan. 1, 2000, sounds like a tolerable weather report: "It's going to be like a couple of inches of snow that stays on the ground for a few days."
So why all the millennial storm clouds? Mainly because the Year 2000 bug is what Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future calls a "low-probability, high-consequence event." Says Saffo: "There is great danger in our cross-dependencies with computers, but there are also lots of humans in the loop making judgments." In the end, says Saffo,"the most likely scenario by far is that we'll muddle through."
As a futurist, however, Saffo does see an opportunity in all this to help distant generations. "For God's sake, let's go to five digits [for calendar dates in software] so we don't have a Y10K problem," he advises. Amen.
--With reporting by Declan McCullagh/Washington