"Technology Outlook" has been prepared on a regular basis since 1995. The purpose of the report is to provide input to DNV’s long-term business, operational and R&D planning, as expressed through DNV’s strategic and tactical plans, and generally to provide information on technology trends.

One of the challenges of predicting future development trends is that the survivors may verify all predictions. It may therefore be of general amusement to look back at earlier predictions. As Mark Twain pointed out: "The art of prophecy is very difficult - especially with respect to the future".

A classical example is the statement by Sextus Julius Frontius, the Chief Military Engineer during the rein of the Emperor Trajan, 98-110 AD: ‘I will ignore all ideas for new work on engines of war, the invention of which has reached its limits and for whose improvement I see no further hope’.

At the turn of the 19th century, many knowledgeable individuals made clear statements that there would be little new technology to be developed in the century to come. The attitude seemed to be that everything of interest had already been invented. Just before the birth of quantum physics (the photoelectric effect, 1905), recognised professors in physics actually discouraged students from including physics in their curricula - there was nothing more to find out!

This was the time when the head of the US patent office suggested to President McKinley that the office might as well be closed down. He stated ‘Discoveries which seem to be approaching their ultimate conditions are telephony; photography; illumination and apparently labour-saving machinery in some fields, since the performance of machines has practically reached perfection. We cannot, indeed, well conceive of a greater activity of invention and a more rapid enfoldment of new processes than we have had before us in the 19th century’.

A more optimistic view was widespread at the end of the 20th century and reflected in the DNV Technology Outlook 2000, which stated: ‘Knowledge-based industry is in a way privileged since knowledge, like entropy, only grows’. We all know what happened with the ICT industry shortly thereafter, but DNV is almost right - information can only grow.

DNV is heavily involved in the qualification of new technology and development of safety standards and we all know that such standard setting may result in one technology being favoured over another. To be the safer technology is always an advantage.

In 1889, electricity had been introduced, contrary to the prediction of Mr. Keates (giving evidence to the British House of Commons) ‘I do not think there is the slightest chance of its competing, in a general way, with gas. There are defects about electric light which, unless some essential change takes place, must entirely prevent its application to ordinary lightening’.

The question of standards was a competition between the Westinghouse's AC design and Edison's DC design. Edison argued that ‘There is no plea which justifies the use of high-tension and alternating current, either in a scientific or a commercial use’. To prove his point, Edison organised a public demonstration of the dangers of the rival technology and he actually electrocuted Topsy, the elephant at the Cony Island amusement park, using AC current, thereby introducing a new application of the new technology that is still in use. Edison also patented this invention.