This book is about the future of technology. In it we will examine some of the many recent developments in a few key fields and try, in a limited way, to predict where they will take us in the next fifteen years or (1)____.　　If that sounds like a modest goal, it’s not. Technology is the (2)____(dominate) force of our time and probably of all time to come. It appears in more varieties than we can count. It changes so rapidly (3)____ no scientist or engineer can keep up with his own field, much less with technology in general. It permeates and shapes our lives at every turn. We live in technology (4)____ fish live in the sea, and we have only a little better chance of (5) f____ the details of its future changes.　　Yet the task is well worth undertaking. Whatever hints we can glean (一点点搜集) about the future win help us prepare for the changes to come. Modest forecasts, evidence of trends, a few concrete developments to be expected all are better than no warning at all. And (6) th____ technology has made the present much less stable than the past, and surely will make the future more disturbed still, there is good reason to hope that our lives, in sum and on average, will be better as a result. In an age of uncomfortable (7) ch____, this is reassurance(保证) we all can use.　　For an idea of what is to come—in magnitude if not in (8) sp____—look to the past. In the last ninety years, the world has shrunk, while human experience has advanced almost beyond the recognition of these who grew up in our grandparent’s generation.A century after America’s (9)____(found) conceived their agrarian (耕地的) democracy, nearly all their descendents still lived on fanning. Since World War I, technology has extracted us from behind horse-drawn plows and plugged us into (10) as____ lines and offices. Today it is removing many of us from offices and letting us work at home or forcing us to work on the road.