Re the existential threat from AI (Letters, 2 June), Phyl Hyde says the concerns over Y2K were “a panic” about an “overblown future cause”. Like many IT specialists across the world, I am fed up with this misinterpretation of what happened. Organisations put serious money into employing thousands of people to inspect their systems and to amend them to ensure the issue was avoided.
Because of this, systems continued to function normally over the century change and lives were not affected. The result was that people thought it was a fuss about nothing. It took several years of planning, resourcing and working to achieve the desired result. It’s probably going to take a lot more to understand and cope with the unintended consequences of AI.
John Thow
Basingstoke, Hampshire
