In January 2038 i will be 68 and retired and living in Monaco on my gold plated pension but for those of you who are not so lucky and discover this post before this date then here is a little heads up, you're screwed.
Allow me to explain about this thing called the Year 2038 computer problem and why you should spend January 19 2038 in a hard topped bomb shelter.
The problem relates to representing time in many digital systems as the number of seconds passed since January 1, 1970 and tops out at a billion after 03:14:07 on 19 January 2038 when the counter runs out of usable digit bits and flips the sign bit and starts to count up toward zero instead of down, basically the clock will then think it's 1901 rather than 2038.
This will cause immense problems for embedded systems that use dates including airplanes and cars as well as communications devices, including mobile phones and the internet servers which have already crashed and refused to restart when the time was changed to that date in an experiment to see what would happen.
I'm sure between 2018 and 2038 software engineers will come up with a solution but i will be supping cocktails beside a swimming pool with the other rich and famous retirees that year so it's your generations problem, good luck and i will be thinking of you especially if the AI is as advanced as we expect it to be when it all goes belly up.
1 comment:
This time the companies that will make a fortune 'putting it right' say it absolutely will happen, guaranteed. Expect the scare stories to really start about 2030.
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