We’ve come to fear that the software that drives our cars will be hacked or that the medical devices we implant in our bodies will be taken over by some evildoer who wants to inject a deadly amount of insulin just for the thrill. It doesn’t have to be that way — and those instances are the rarity, not the norm.

Yes, we are becoming a digital-first society. In fact, 42% of CEOs say they are now “digital to the core,” according to Gartner (registration required). Gartner also argues that a big part of digital success begins with redefining how value will be delivered through software. The only problem with this is that software is not broadly understood. In fact, it’s often been referred to as the “IT Black Box,” a term based on the fact that we software engineers don’t always know what we’re working on.

For example, COBOL programming has been around since the early 60s. The generation of software engineers who built much of the traditional business software that runs COBOL have long since retired, but the software they designed is still powering many of the largest and most successful businesses today.

Over the past 60 years, our reliance on software has grown, but very little has been done to master and control it. I think one of the most used approaches to enhance existing software to help it meet evolving market demand is to trash previous versions and build new software from the ground up, creating a different “monster” and propagating the impression that software engineers don’t really understand any software they haven’t written themselves.

In the 90s, rapid application development (RAD), which was, in fact, a radical idea for the time, came and laid a foundation for what DevOps and Agile have done in the 21st century. While RAD put less emphasis on planning and more emphasis on an adaptive process, it did not necessarily help IT systems become easier to explain or better understood.

So how are we supposed to trust and rely on something we don’t understand?

Just because we don’t fully understand something does not mean we’re exempt from making decisions about it or based on its existence. Software is outliving us, and it’s quickly becoming smarter about itself than we are.

Removing our fear about software starts by acquiring knowledge about it.