Vineet Agrawal is an engineer, entrepreneur, investor, and writer whose career and interests have consistently crossed disciplines. Trained as an engineer, he has spent more than three decades working with complex systems, including major transportation and infrastructure projects in the United States. He is the founder and president of Tarjuna Systems, a San Francisco-based engineering consulting firm.Outside engineering, Agrawal has spent decades as an independent investor and student of history, economics, religion, philosophy, science, and technological change. That combination - an engineer's instinct to understand how systems work, an investor's habit of thinking across long periods of time, and a lifelong interest in the ideas and beliefs that shape human societies - eventually led to a much larger question: Could the story of humanity be examined as one continuous story, from the origins of matter and life to civilization, faith, artificial intelligence, and whatever may come after us? That question became From the Beginning to the Future, an ambitious work of fiction that draws across these disciplines while asking what may be the defining question of the coming century: what happens when the intelligence humanity creates begins to confront the same questions about existence, morality, purpose, freedom, and consciousness that humans have struggled with for thousands of years? Agrawal lives in San Francisco.