Future Legacy

Legacy versus Liability.

In personal context, "legacy" is considered life time achievement.
When referred to in technological/societal context, "legacy" are the mistakes from the past we still have to deal with, like nuclear waste, asbestos-laced buildings, federal budget deficits & national debt, MRSA, environmental abuse, tribal wars & genocide - the unintended consequences of previously ignorant decisions.

What are we doing today, what are we building today, what decisions are we committing to today, that will have adverse outcomes, unintended effects, as the future emerges.
Some of them will shape the future. Others will clash with the original assumptions we had how things would be, and when a new reality sets in, the decisions made based on old/narrow/short-sighted assumptions will turn into liabilities.

While there can be deliberate improvements to the state of affairs, often dealing with bad choices from the past amounts to just keeping the ship afloat by scooping out the breaking in water, but never getting around to actually fix the holes that cause the leaking in the first place.

This article is about how our decisions today will contribute to problems in the future, but may not be obvious until the future arrives. Then in the future, we may regret the short-sighted decisions we may have made in the past. I will make the point that we should be more mindful about how what we build today, what we decide in the present, may become a liability in the future, and how to mitigate this with more mindfulness, more flexible assumptions, and a nurturing process to upgrade our assumptions and the solutions we come up with.

We are ever more focused on fixing our mistakes from the past than actually making genuine progress. And on the other extreme, we hastily jump into future opportunity without considerations how these decisions will play out in a larger context (broader as well as further out consequences).

We live in the present, now. What was before is the past, and what will come next is the future.
What from the current moment, the now, appears as the future, will in the future be its own present. And what used to be our current present, will fall into the past as we arrive in what is today seen as the future, and when it arrives, turn into the then-present.
Past->Present->Future are relative concepts. Our consciousness is largely rooted in the present, the now, the moment plus/minus a window of a few hours/days (how each of us interprets the present can be variable as well).

Many visions of the future seem to anchor on how developments from the present lead into the future. Another way of considering the future is how what is now the present will become the future history. The current present will become the past in the future.

In the IT industry there is this concept of "legacy systems", referring to outdated, unsupported systems and applications, which once had their purpose, but as life moved on, their usefulness has become obsolete. Contrary to the concept of "legacy" in reference to humans, which implies some sort of life-time accomplishment, in IT culture "legacy" is a rather derogatory, implying outdated, useless, cumbersome to keep up for no good reason - much more fun to do new things, try out state-of-the-art technology, tools, toys.

Yet, we keep repeating the cycle of building future legacy systems, shiny new "solutions" in our respective present, often with little regard for how in time these solutions will become outdated, obsolete, and then have to be cumbersomely maintained, or gracefully shutdown/transitioned.

Given that our modern civilization is heavily dependent on complex webs of technology systems and software applications, the vulnerability to aging solutions, losing their effectiveness as life has grown beyond their meaningful use (yet dependencies on it still may exist), the effect of aging technology infrastructure is becoming as relevant as similar phenomenon in structural engineering, such as collapsing bridges and leaking nuclear waste sites.

The contamination of ever faster moving society & technological change with static outdated critical support systems built for simpler times, on more stable assumptions, is becoming a real problem, to the extent that there is a whole set of professionals being paid to take care of old systems.
In the beginning of my software developer career, I got paid good money as a young professional for reverse engineering old software and transitioning (refactoring) it onto more modern platforms, to enable contiunity for businesses operating on that aging and unsupported application platform. My wife holds a well compensated and highly regarded job within a major healthcare company, focusing on what they call "sunsetting", gracefully decommissioning old servers while ensuring regulatory compliance to record retention and patient data governance. Millions of dollars are being spent just for continuing the same business process while swapping out the underlying degrading support systems.

Given all this, I see an opportunity to consider how moving into the future will change the position and status of that which doesn't change on its own. How things age without really changing themselves, but that the change of life around them makes their standing still look like going backwards, becoming brittle, like material fatigue, except software doesnt' really "age" physically.
(except perhaps for the concept of "bit rot")