Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.? By Matthew Hutson

At artificial-intelligence conferences, researchers are increasingly alarmed by what they see. Many kinds of researchers—biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and so on—encounter checkpoints at which they are asked about the ethics of their research. This doesn’t happen as much in computer science. Still, at some conferences, new norms are being formalized. Last year, for the first time, the Association for Computational Linguistics asked reviewers to consider the ethical impacts of submitted research. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has decided to do the same. Neur IPS now requires that papers discuss “the potential broader impact of their work . . . both positive and negative.”