Hoover Institution (Washington D.C.) — Contributors to the 2025 edition of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review brought its findings to America’s capital on February 25, with the challenge and promise presented by frontier technologies now clearer than ever before.
A collaboration between the Hoover Institution, the Stanford School of Engineering, and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the report—produced through the Stanford Emerging Technology Review (SETR) initiative, based on leading research from Stanford scientists, engineers, and policy experts—serves as a one-stop primer into state-of-the-art innovations in ten key domains and what to look out for in the future.
“We have one hundred faculty across forty different departments and institutes in engineering and the social sciences, along with policy experts, working together in a multidisciplinary team to better understand what’s happening in our labs, what’s happening in our businesses, at the speed of relevance,” SETR co-chair Amy Zegart said during a public program on Capitol Hill, which featured Hoover Institution director Condoleezza Rice, SETR faculty council members, and two sitting US senators.
Beyond the report, the goal of the larger SETR partnership is ambitious: to transform technological education for decision makers in both the public and private sectors so that the United States can seize opportunities, mitigate risks, and ensure that the American innovation ecosystem continues to thrive.
The 2025 SETR report surveys ten frontier technologies: AI, biotechnology and synthetic biology, cryptography, lasers, materials science, neuroscience, robotics, semiconductors, space, and sustainable energy technologies. These fields are widely regarded as pivotal to shaping societies, economics, and geopolitics today and into the future.
Secretary Rice said the report benefits from having direct input from leading researchers and practitioners in each emerging technological field.
“What we’ve done is to go to people who are in the labs, at the bench, actually doing the leading-edge work in these technologies,” said Secretary Rice, who co-chairs SETR along with Zegart, Engineering School dean Jennifer Widom, and Hoover senior fellow John B. Taylor. “So, we’re not just a group of political scientists talking about a bunch of technologies we don’t understand.”
Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado welcomed the report as a means of raising awareness about the ways some frontier technologies are moving into the mainstream.
“The level of urgency that this country should feel isn’t quite there,” he said.
It’s a notion shared by Fei-Fei Li, founding co-director of HAI and a SETR faculty contributor. She noted that generative AI is now in the hands of practically everyone with an internet connection, and that will have profound implications for society and the global economy.
“What’s really exciting over these past few years, especially with the large language models, is that this is the first coming of age of this technology that’s about more than half a century old that is now reaching the hands of consumers and industry,” Li said.
“It’s taken the world by storm. Suddenly whether you’re a software engineer or someone at home wanting to look up a recipe, you can use this language, and many businesses are embracing [large language model]-based products and services.”
The report also drives home the geopolitical ramifications of innovation, Indiana senator Todd Young said.
“One can trace GDP and geopolitical power to outcompeting adversaries. Now, because of the brute-force economics of our adversaries, we really need to figure out how to optimize our existing system and work on its shortcomings too.”
Other SETR scholars participating in the Capitol Hill program also emphasized that the breakthroughs detailed in the report will only continue so long as the United States has access to the best talent.
SETR director and Hoover research fellow Herbert Lin said part of that talent pool should involve allowing top-notch foreign graduate and postgraduate students to remain in the United States after they complete their studies.
“We make a practice of importing graduate students from all over the world, and when they get their PhDs, we kick them out—we go out of our way to kick them out,” he said.
SETR faculty and chairs circulated the report and its findings to Washington policymakers. They spoke about the report with members of Congress and officials at the White House, including representatives from the National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, as well as leaders and staffers at the State Department. They also held briefings at the Department of Defense and with the intelligence community.
On February 26, several SETR scholars, including Lin, Allison Okamura, Zegart, and Mark Horowitz, spoke in a discussion—broadcast live online from the Council on Foreign Relations’s Peterson Hall in New York City—about the report and how it explains the connections between frontier technologies and geopolitics.
Watch a video of their discussion here.
(From Left to Right) Mark Horowitz, Herbert Lin, Allison Okamura and Amy Zegart speak from the Council on Foreign Relations’s Peterson Hall in New York City on February 26, 2025. (Kaveh Sardari)
SETR scholars and experts from the Council on Foreign Relations also joined together to produce a limited-series podcast on emerging technologies. The Interconnect features discussions about the policy implications of frontier technologies such as semiconductors, robotics and space.
Episodes can be found here.
