The volume include the programme and abstracts of the 45th ICOHTEC Symposium held in Saint-Étienne, France on 17-21 July 2018. It was distributed as a printed book to more than 200 participants of the symposium. The general theme of the symposium was “Technological Drive from Past to Future? 50 years of ICOHTEC.” The intention was to inquire into long-term trends in interactions between technology and society, as well as how technologies have influenced utopian and dystopian views of the future. The symposium examined how the role of technology has changed across history and what characters and trends of technological change historians can help to anticipate in the future what are the most likely continuities from the past to the future. The value of memories of the past for the present and future has been frequently discussed; the German theologian Albert Schweitzer claimed that “happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory”, whereas Spanish philosopher George Santayana argued that “those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.” The symposium intended to explore whether there is any possibility of solving the tension between history and future.