"In the midst of growing public concern over artificial intelligence (AI), privacy and the use of data, Brent Hecht
has a controversial proposal: the computer-science community should
change its peer-review process to ensure that researchers disclose any
possible negative societal consequences of their work in papers, or risk
rejection.
Hecht, a computer scientist, chairs the Future of Computing Academy (FCA), a group of young leaders in the field that pitched the policy in March.
Without such measures, he says, computer scientists will blindly
develop products without considering their impacts, and the field risks
joining oil and tobacco as industries whose researchers history judges
unfavourable.
The FCA is part of the Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM) in New York City, the world’s largest computing society.
It, too, is making changes to encourage researchers to consider
societal impacts: on 17 July, it published an updated version of its ethics code,
last redrafted in 1992. The guidelines call on researchers to be alert
to how their work can influence society, take steps to protect privacy
and continually reassess technologies whose impact will change over
time, such as those based in machine learning."
