The binary view is mostly true, unless it's for events or problems they are themselves familiar with. There is a term for this, but can't for the life of me remember it: People think the problems they are dealing with are infinitely more nuanced, complex and unique than the problems other people are dealing with.

And even worse, they don't think probability is a thing. If something happens, it was certain to happen and we just failed to predict it correctly.

So when someone predicts something will happen with a 90% probability, and then the 10% chances happens and the predicted event does not happen, people will talk about what a bad prediction that was and how they were clearly wrong.

It's the same logic that causes people to say vaccines don't work because they don't stop a disease with 100% effectiveness, or that there is no point to wear a seatbelt because people still die while wearing one.

This is interesting, do you have any links?

A couple of possible confounding factors I can think of:

1. Plenty of countries use software developed elsewhere.

2. I suspect that the more recently you computerised your economy, the less likely it would be to have code vulnerable to Y2K.

The one case I'm aware of where a software glitch did cause a plane crash, there was pilot error compounding the problem. Air France flight 447 was an Airbus A330 flying from France to Brazil, and while high over the Atlantic, the software recorded inconsistent data in its airspeed measurements. (The official crash analysis team concluded that the inconsistent data was likely due to ice crystals blocking the pitot tubes on the plane). The inconsistent data made the autopilot disengage. Pilot error then caused a stall. One pilot then tried the correct move to recover from a stall, pushing forward on the stick to nose down and regain speed. The other pilot was pulling up on the stick to stop the dive, not realizing that that's exactly the wrong thing to do in a stall (or more likely forgetting his training due to panic; he had a lot less experience). The flight software, receiving inconsistent inputs from both controls, averaged the inputs, resulting in zero change in pitch. (It also sounded the "Dual Input" alarm, but the pilots were too preoccupied with their own controls to figure out what that meant at first, and by the time they figured out what was going on it was too late to recover before the plane hit the water).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4224707 has some discussion of the events, including the fact that the control design (where each pilot has an independent stick) was part of the problem. On a design like Boeing uses where both sets of controls move together, the experienced pilot would have noticed the less-experienced pilot pulling up on the stick because his own stick would be moving, and he would have said "No, nose down." And if they had nosed down to recover speed while still high enough in the air, they almost certainly could have regained control of the plane and saved 228 lives (including their own).

So in retrospect, I think my first sentence was wrong. The software did not glitch, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was pilot error that caused the initial stall, and multiple pilot errors that caused the failure to recover from the stall.

There may be examples of software error that has caused planes to fall out of the sky, but I don't know of any. The only plane crashes whose cause I know were due to hardware failure or pilot error, usually a combination of the two.

To be fair, there was a non-zero chance that society could have ended (or your company, or the tech became obsolete) before 2000, which would be higher the earlier before 2000 you were.

Year 2038 says hi.

I'm curious why things would have shut down when the system thought it was 1900. What part of the logic had the effect of "shut the system down if current date is less than (X date)?" (If you can remember the code 25+ years later, that is).