Technology AI, Science and New Things
One to file under technical but important: Wired reports that Elon Musk’s Doge is planning to move US social security systems off the Cobol programming language and onto a more modern equivalent in the next few months.
This is a job which, if you want to do it safely, should take years. (A 2017 proposal to modernise the systems allowed for five.)
But Doge is a department in a hurry, and doesn’t seem to mind the risks the expedited migration of more than 60 million lines of code will pose to the benefits of more than 65 million Americans.
About 12 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women aged 65 or older are thought to rely on social security for at least 90 per cent of their income.
Any one of them could be vulnerable to Musk’s ‘move fast and break things’ approach.
The tech billionaire laid the groundwork for the migration weeks ago when he claimed “150-year-olds” were collecting social security benefits. Spoiler: they weren’t.
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