It's Time to Do Something: Mitigating the Negative Impacts of Computing Through a Change to the Peer Review Process

TL;DR

This paper proposes a simple modification to the peer review process in computing research to encourage greater consideration of societal impacts, aiming to reduce negative consequences like privacy erosion and job automation.

Contribution

It introduces a specific change to peer review that incentivizes researchers to evaluate and address the societal impacts of their work.

Findings

Expected increased awareness of societal impacts among researchers

Anticipated incentivization of impact-focused research and policy

Potential reduction in negative societal effects of computing innovations

Abstract

The computing research community needs to work much harder to address the downsides of our innovations. Between the erosion of privacy, threats to democracy, and automation's effect on employment (among many other issues), we can no longer simply assume that our research will have a net positive impact on the world. While bending the arc of computing innovation towards societal benefit may at first seem intractable, we believe we can achieve substantial progress with a straightforward step: making a small change to the peer review process. As we explain below, we hypothesize that our recommended change will force computing researchers to more deeply consider the negative impacts of their work. We also expect that this change will incentivize research and policy that alleviates computing's negative impacts.