A more likely scenario is that there will be a good amount of inconvenience. . The threat of real harm in the year 2000 situation is for large, old legacy software programs in big companies. If a company can t get its system up in the year 2000, it just might go out of business. Some systems will fail and others will probably run poorly. We will all spend more time in lines as clerks can t find our records, or the systems don t accept input.
Most large businesses are hard at work fixing their hardware and software.
Suddenly there is a great fear that even if we fix all the software and hardware, our society will still just completely quit running when all the embedded systems fail. Most of them will not fail. The big three auto makers are saying that their cars should run without a problem with the chips they presently have. Further testing should confirm this later in the year. But other things car related might not work.