- Science & Technology
Dr. Herb Lin is the director of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review and the Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution. He researches policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, particularly the use of offensive operations in cyberspace as instruments of national policy.
Martin Giles: As well as being the director of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review (SETR), a report that provides an annual overview of ten key frontier technologies, you’re also the author of a chapter in it that’s devoted to crosscutting themes among those technologies. What’s the thinking behind that?
Herb Lin: As you look over many different fields of emerging technology, certain themes keep coming up again and again—not necessarily in every one of them, but definitely in many fields. These themes are more or less independent of the technical substance of any particular technology area and they have to do with general issues like innovation paths and supporting infrastructure and human talent. We thought it would be useful to highlight them for policymakers and business leaders so they can bear them in mind when crafting legislation and corporate strategies.
Martin Giles: In the 2025 edition of SETR, you divide the fourteen crosscutting themes you write about into two broad subgroups: “Key Observations About How Technologies Evolve Over Time” and “Common Innovation Enablers and Inhibitors.” What made you choose these particular ones?
Herb Lin: We could have used other kinds of groupings, too—and in the future we may do so—but the rationale for the first of the two categories in the 2025 edition was as follows. As you look at different emerging technologies, you see they exhibit certain common patterns of development. For example, there’s this phenomenon called “punctuated equilibrium” in which you see only modest change in a field for a while, then all of a sudden there’s a big change, and then it goes back to more incremental change every year. This happens across a lot of fields, though not all of them. An example is the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, which sparked a huge wave of innovation in smartphone apps that subsequently tailed off somewhat. There were mobile phones around long before the iPhone, but it was the introduction of Apple’s hardware and software platform that really sparked the change.
Another observation about how technologies evolve over time is the general trend towards democratized access to emerging tech. For example, it used to be true that superpower governments were the only entities capable of launching satellites into space. Now, with the advent of commercial space technologies, even small countries can get access to space by buying launch services. It’s also true in biology, where it’s now possible to pay a third party to synthesize particular DNA sequences of thousands of base pairs for you.
Martin Giles: Let’s turn to the themes in your second grouping, which covers enablers and inhibitors of innovation. A new theme you added this year is titled “Frontier Bias in Policymaking.” Can you explain how this bias arises?
Herb Lin: We need to think about how knowledge about emerging technologies diffuses to the public. The news media follow the scientific literature like researchers do, and they like to focus on the benefits that a scientific advance may deliver, not necessarily on the specific details of how that advance was achieved. When scientists come up with some interesting thing, the temptation is to present it in terms of the possible implications it might have. But the actual applications are usually a long way off from the scientific breakthrough.
Take nuclear fusion. In 2022, the first “better-than-breakeven” fusion experiment was conducted, which saw media headlines proclaim that a reaction had output more energy than was needed to create it in the first place. But what got measured in terms of inputs was the energy needed for the lasers that caused the fusion. The media coverage didn’t account for the additional energy needed to create that laser energy in the first place. The energy the power company billed the researchers was a hundred times more than the amount extracted from the reaction. However, if you focused on the headlines, you’d think fusion power is around the corner when in fact there’s still a very long road to commercial breakeven. The temptation amongst the media and even some experts to overemphasize what’s being achieved in a field, and the benefits that could arise from it, is what we mean by “frontier bias” and it can influence policymakers.
Martin Giles: Does this frontier bias mean opportunities with older technologies get overlooked?
Herb Lin: Policymakers and business leaders need to remember that impactful innovation doesn’t just take place at the frontier. For example, when the batteries in electric cars reach their end of useful life, there’s still some capacity left in them that could be useful for other applications. There’s increasingly interest in using secondhand car batteries for storing electricity produced by renewables such as solar power. That’s not a frontier tech per se, but it could be extremely beneficial.
Martin Giles: The other new theme you added in the 2025 edition of SETR is the “Goldilocks challenge.” Can you talk a bit about that? I assume it doesn’t have anything to do with three bears.
Herb Lin: Well, we’re not talking about too hot, too cold, and just right—but we are talking about too fast, too slow, and just right. New technologies bring benefits, but they also pose risks. As a nation, if you move too slowly in an emerging tech domain, you may lose a lot of the first-mover advantages as others overtake you. But by definition, new technologies and the business models they inspire are disruptive and if you build them too fast to a large scale there could be significant economic and human costs. Many people may be upset by the changes.
We saw this with the introduction of ride-sharing services and the impact these had on taxi companies and drivers. Some people say let’s just blow an incumbent model up as fast as we can using new tech, and it’s true that we may be better off in doing so. But we shouldn’t always assume that will be the case, especially in the short run. You need to strike the right balance between speed and the risk of societal backlash—hence the Goldilocks reference.
Martin Giles: Fourteen crosscutting themes is a large number to have to bear in mind when you’re a busy regulator or legislator. How can we make it easier for policymakers to take relevant ones into account when shaping new rules and laws?
Herb Lin: I can imagine something like these themes being part of a charter for an organization like the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). But they’re not something you can mandate that people pay attention to. In the end, these themes are part of being wise when it comes to crafting policies that impact emerging technologies. The goal of the chapter is to help people to think about science and technology and their role in American society in an appropriately broad context.
Martin Giles: You’ve just started work on the 2026 edition of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review, which will be published early next year. Can you give us a sneak peek into one new theme you might be adding?
Herb Lin: Sure. We’ll be highlighting the importance of technical standards. These are capabilities or features that you build into, for example, a new device or piece of software and they help promote things such as interoperability and data sharing. Getting your preferred standard adopted versus someone else’s can help influence the evolution of a frontier technology, which is why they are strategically important.
Trying to impose standards too early in a field may inhibit innovation, but without standards it can be harder and take longer to achieve things like interoperability that can deliver significant benefits. Governments and businesses have another Goldilocks-like challenge to grapple with here, which is why we think it’s important to include standardization in our crosscutting themes.
