What can History teach us?

The failure of Google Glass to become a raging success is mirrored by the difficulty other technologies had in being adopted, for example the dining fork. Britain was relatively quick with the umbrella (I wonder why?).

The podcast The Secret History of the Future looks at how the long story of technology has lessons to teach us: the first cyber attack was in the nineteenth century according to the podcast. Episodes of the podcast look at automata and driverless cars and demonstrate the long lineage of these ideas. Can we foretell the future by studying the past? Are there lessons from History which can illuminate present issues? Does history repeat itself or are we too ready to seek patterns in chaos?