More and more people have started to pay attention to artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years. According to Edelman's special report on tech within its annual Trust Barometer report, people around the world have shown concern that AI and robots could replace human workers. As a result, fewer people are willing to share their personal data, as their trust in the media, online social platforms and search engines seems to have declined. Some say the chasm between trust and technology has formed for good reasons: For most of AI's existence, there hasn't been much regulation around it. At times, the rules may seem a bit loose and opaque for just how world-changing it could be.

For years, Brent Hecht, an associate professor at Northwestern University who studies AI ethics, felt like a voice crying in the wilderness. When he entered the field in 2008, "I recall just agonizing about how to get people to understand and be interested and get a sense of how powerful some of the risks [of AI research] could be," he says. To be sure, Hecht wasn't--and isn't--the only academic studying the societal impacts of AI. But the group is small. "In terms of responsible AI, it is a sideshow for most institutions," Hecht says.

A researcher recently laid out a controversial proposal to add to a round of peer reviews for journals and conferences that would look at the societal consequences of any computer science research. In an interview published in Nature, Brent Hecht, who is an assistant professor at Northwestern University, director of the People, Space, and Algorithms Research Group, and the chair of the ACM Future of Computing Academy, said that the "peer reviewers must ensure that researchers consider negative societal consequences of their work." He is also of the strong opinion that the review process for any research should have the researcher to assess how the technology can be used in the future. If the researcher does not perform such an analysis then the journal should reject the paper. In March of 2018, Hecht wrote a proposal titled It's Time to Do Something: Mitigating the Negative Impacts of Computing Through a Change to the Peer Review Process where he said that the current research community only thinks of the benefits a research paper can have no impact on the society.