On Quantifying and Understanding the Role of Ethics in AI Research: A Historical Account of Flagship Conferences and Journals

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the historical presence of ethics-related research in leading AI, machine learning, and robotics venues, providing quantitative evidence of the community's ethical concerns over time.

Contribution

It offers a long-term, corpus-based analysis of ethics in top AI venues, highlighting trends and the increasing prominence of ethical considerations.

Findings

Ethics-related terms have become more prominent in publications over time.

Quantitative evidence shows growing ethical concerns in AI research.

Analysis covers a large corpus of flagship conferences and journals.

Abstract

Recent developments in AI, Machine Learning and Robotics have raised concerns about the ethical consequences of both academic and industrial AI research. Leading academics, businessmen and politicians have voiced an increasing number of questions about the consequences of AI not only over people, but also on the large-scale consequences on the the future of work and employment, its social consequences and the sustainability of the planet. In this work, we analyse the use and the occurrence of ethics-related research in leading AI, machine learning and robotics venues. In order to do so we perform long term, historical corpus-based analyses on a large number of flagship conferences and journals. Our experiments identify the prominence of ethics-related terms in published papers and presents several statistics on related topics. Finally, this research provides quantitative evidence on the pressing ethical concerns of the AI community.