We made it. 200 editions. It’s a big round number isn’t it? It’s sort of like when the Christian world celebrated the number 2000 – we’re the Gregorian calendar of local publishing. We can only hold a torch to the old boys of print media, who are more like a Turkish solar calendar, but it feels like it’s been a fair run thus far.
We only kicked off in 2004 but just four years earlier, around the time that people were partying like it was 1999, the world was in turmoil. ‘The Millennium Bug’, which was given the catchy title ‘Y2K’, was potentially set to destroy the world’s computer systems. Computers, you see, had been taught to use the last two digits of the year only, saving all that power it took to process the first two digits of the year. Anything that referenced, for example, 2002 and 1888 was really tricky for early computers. 104 years? 4 years? They simply didn’t understand the difference.
When people realised this problem was coming, it was big business. In 1995 it cost the New York Stock Exchange seven years and $30m to make its machines ready to accept there were another two pesky Gregorian digits at the front. That would be $62.9m in today’s money. How do I know that, you might ask…? Did I work out the compound interest? Did I look up 30 years of American inflation statistics? No, obviously I just asked ChatGPT. Interestingly, I also asked DeepSeek, the Chinese pretender that is seeking to oust ChatGPT from the AI throne, that told me it would have been $60.75m. Each took about 5 seconds to tell me; the latter provided its workings out. The Chinese are doing to AI what they did to car production; faster production and a cheaper offering with some slingshotting from existing products.
In three decades, computers have gone from being cobbled by two digits to being able to use their own digits, and brains, to a level we can only aspire. The impending quickening of AI in our lives has been our predominant office chat for the last few months. It’s the Millennium Bug of our time, but a bug that is set to grow up and be smarter than us before we get to 2030. It’s giving existential crisis. As we look back on 200 editions of print, we look forward to the unknown with tentative positivity. AI will change everything but Gallery is a reflection of the humanity of Jersey, and that’s what we all really need around us.
BD
