This first chapter offers a brief historical overview of the relationship between human beings and their technical outputs. It tracks the journey of the notion of technique from Aristotle’s téchne concept to the present technology, stopping briefly at some recent milestones marked by the so-called humanities philosophy of technology and its view of technique, as well as the ‘engineering philosophy of technology’ corpus. While the literature on the broader philosophy of technology topic is vast, this chapter highlights the conditions required for a positive outlook on technology (Vallor, Technology and the Virtues. A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. Oxford University Press, 2016), which proves necessary to avoid both uncritical and demonizing views of technology. At the same time, it acknowledges that we are confronted with the well-known technological ambivalence—that is, the fact that technology can be used for good or for evil.