Life's demands are such that it's easy to get lost in the day-to-day, trapped inside your own private world, expecting today to repeat endlessly and the future to remain a distant, untroubling land. The future is coming, however, whether you are ready or not, and when it does everything will change. This talk is a history lesson that covers 3,000 years of technology. It uses the past to lend perspective to the present and give guidance for the future. It reminds us where we come from and suggests how technology can help us to choose where we’ll go next.