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

Understand

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.