This article introduces the concept of standards debt to analyse a neglected layer of technological
governance. Existing scholarship has examined regulatory lag, the pacing problem and the
Collingridge dilemma, but has paid less attention to the delayed development of the assessment
infrastructures through which governance becomes operational. Standards debt is defined as the
institutional and temporal misalignment between recognised needs for technological evaluation
and the maturity of the standards, benchmarks, tests, audits and conformity-assessment systems
required to act on them. Through two contrastive cases — artificial intelligence and biotech/medical
technologies — the article shows how standards debt appears both in fluid digital systems and
in embodied, highly regulated convergent systems. AI illustrates performance debt and legitimacy
debt: benchmark performance can be measured before social accountability is standardised. Biotech/
MedTech illustrates lifecycle debt and institutional-capacity debt: evidence, certification capacity
and post-market monitoring often lag behind technological convergence. The article argues
that Technology Assessment must move from assessing technologies alone toward assessing the
infrastructures that make technologies assessable, auditable and governable.
Paper for the Joint Workshop GUG and VDI Workshop “Never Neutral” Deutsches Museum, 18th-19th June 2026