Dear ladies and gentlemen, appraisers of Technology, let me relate to you a tale. The strapping young man you see before you was not always such a fine specimen of sophistication and efficiency. In fact, in his early days, he was really not much to look at...

After rolling into existence with the help of the wheel, Technology lingered in his infancy, teething on the rack and the astrolabe and learning to crawl by imitating the merrily puffing steam engine. Next followed the bulky toddler years in which he was babysat by the admirably pretty but rather dull Spinning Jenny, and the frustrating years of childhood during which found him studying multiplication tables late into the night because somebody had gone and invented electricity. To his credit, it didn't take long for Technology to shed off the vinyl records and 8-tracks that accompanied the awkwardness of adolescence, and to move with speed that could only be the product of NASA know-how, into glorious adulthood.

The next fifty years will be an exciting time for Technology. Now that he's got himself a super-mini-itty-bitty iPod that can play more songs than the number of atoms on the head of a pin, he will surely win the hearts of all the ladies.

His preference in women seems to include any darling that is slick, metallic, and can fit in his pocket. The perfect wife for Technology, however, is sure to be a girl who can mend pain. Technology will make every effort to get the gal who cures cancer and backs AIDS into a corner. But she'll have to be a master chef as well, for having been raised on bread and water, Technology has developed a picky appetite. Consequently, the girl of his dreams will only to serve him only the most thoroughly bioengineered food – that which is superior in size, nutritional quality, and flavor to any old thing a farmer could just pluck out of the ground or lead out of a pasture.

Now, unless Technology spends all of his free time in virtual reality chat rooms and on the hover car racetrack, he will tie the knot with his honey in no time flat, and, being a lonely creature, will get down to the child rearing business immediately. Yes, in the upcoming years, Technology will multiply effortlessly, ceaselessly, and shamelessly, until the point at which we humans will be unable to put our shoes on without the assistance of Squinty Ted's Shoelace Quantifier.

On the plus side, however, our immune systems will be as clean as the meticulously filtered atmosphere, any of our damaged limbs will have been replaced by anatomically correct appendages express-grown in a laboratory, and we will all have a microchip containing the complete Encyclopedia Britannica installed smack dab in the middle of our frontal lobes.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us congratulate Technology on his fabulous entrance into the adult world, and wish him the best of luck in the next fifty years.