Technology forecasting attempts to predict the future characteristics of useful technological machines, procedures or techniques. Primarily, a technological forecast deals with the characteristics of technology, such as levels of technical performance, like speed of a military aircraft, the power in watts of a particular future engine, the accuracy or precision of a measuring instrument, the number of transistors in a chip in the year 2015, etc. The forecast does not have to state how these characteristics will be achieved. Secondly, technological forecasting usually deals with only useful...