Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from 01 January 1970

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Presented at hack.lu 2024 by

Trey Darley

The 2038 problem will soon start to get picked up by the popular press, which will lead to significant public pressure to do something before our technology stack crashes. However our technology stack is getting so complex with abstraction layers that by 2038 it might positively unmanageable. This presents us with an opportunity to refit our social tech stack with something not only "secure-by-design" but also maintainable-by-future-generations-by-design. Behind all this drama lurks the challenge that as 19 January 2038 draws closer, ever more hands from around the globe will be frantically reaching for increasingly scarce components from one hotly contested island off the coast of the PRC. This is the truly hard problem which lies before us today.