Y2K actually cost ~$300B and 30,000 lives; mocking the predictors was wrong
burny_tech · x · 2026-10-26
Roko Mijic runs the numbers on Y2K: fixing it consumed skilled labor equivalent to one engineer working 2 million years, with an economic cost of roughly a third of a trillion dollars in today's money—about 30,000 lives. The "nothingburger" impression is an illusion caused by scope insensitivity, so penalizing those who predicted disaster is midwit behavior. The quoted post notes ESYudkowsky predicted a "major catastrophe" in 1999 (and the singularity by 2025).
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