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Open research questions in Ethics and Social Impacts of AI

1,105 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 3,651 Ethics and Social Impacts of AI papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • Within that constraint, the one-person squad model was tested at its extreme boundary a single engineer and intermediate configurations such as two- or three-person AI-augmented squads were not investigated; those configurations may offer more practical and generaliz- able operating models for most enterprise contexts.

    One Developer Is All You Need: A Case Study of an AI-Augmented One-Person Squad in a Brownfield Enterprise · 2026

  • The exact incubation period for 'AI dependency effects' is still nascent. The study identifies a gap in understanding the relationship between AI dependence and employee innovative behavior.

    “Overdependence on algorithms?”: how artificial intelligence ethical leadership can safeguard self-efficacy and spur innovation · 2026 · DOI

  • The difficulty of governing AI-driven misinformation due to its rapid diffusion and automated production. The need for coordinated and adaptive policy mixes that align regulatory instruments with enterprise behavior and user uptake. The challenge of managing governance costs while effectively curbing AI-generated misinformation.

    Coordinated incentives in AI-generated misinformation governance · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of effective governance mechanisms for AI-driven misinformation. The need for coordinated and adaptive policy mixes that align regulatory instruments with enterprise behavior and user uptake. The limited understanding of the strategic interdependence among government regulators, AI enterprises, and users in the context of AI-generated misinformation.

    Coordinated incentives in AI-generated misinformation governance · 2026 · DOI

  • Training that treats Federated Learning and Privacy-Preserving AI as a settled body of findings misrepresents its condition; training that treats it as all open questions fails to convey what has been secured.

    Training Without Gathering the Data: A Historical Development Review of Federated Learning and Privacy-Preserving AI · 2026 · DOI

  • Further exploration of the parent–child relationship as a model for corporate moral responsibility for AIs - Investigation of the owner-pet relationship as a potential model for assigning moral responsibility - Examination of the implications of epistemic indeterminacy for assigning moral responsibility

    The New ‘Parent’ Corporation (Moral Responsibility for Sophisticated AI Systems) · 2026 · DOI

  • The risk of automation bias and moral distancing due to AI integration in healthcare decision-making. The challenge of preserving the integrity of conscience in an era increasingly shaped by AI. The need to integrate theological reflection with real-world health contexts while maintaining analytical rigor and interdisciplinary relevance.

    Conscience, Care, and Code: Moral Theology, AI, and Ethical Decision-Making at the Thresholds of Life · 2026 · DOI

  • This study is limited by its reliance on textual analysis, which, while rigorous, remains interpretative and subject to the researcher's philosophical perspective

    Conscience, Care, and Code: Moral Theology, AI, and Ethical Decision-Making at the Thresholds of Life · 2026 · DOI

  • The paper identifies the challenge of rendering aptic normativity tractable, given the dense thicket of interacting forces that form our conceptual needs. It discusses the difficulty of appraising concepts by holding them up against the totality of our needs. The paper also mentions the challenge of bridging the historical divide between subjective wants and objective requirements.

    Needs of the mind: how aptic normativity can guide conceptual adaptation · 2026 · DOI

  • The paper identifies a gap in existing approaches, which focus on the goals of concept-users or the functions of concepts, missing the important notion of need. It argues that the need-first approach is particularly well-suited to guiding conceptual adaptation in times of social and technological upheaval.

    Needs of the mind: how aptic normativity can guide conceptual adaptation · 2026 · DOI

  • the persistence of racial disparities despite technical fairness interventions. the limitations of technical interventions in addressing deeper causal mechanisms driving racialized disparities. the need to understand the relationship between AI and social disparities.

    Is AI ethics about AI? · 2026 · DOI

  • Investigate the deeper structural and normative forces that sustain inequities, - Examine how these forces shape both the social world and the underlying methodological assumptions of ML

    Is AI ethics about AI? · 2026 · DOI

  • Stresses the need for better understanding of how new technologies shape ethical discourse - Limited to a specific geopolitical context (Western states) - Does not provide quantitative results or empirical data

    The Intellectual Inheritance of Machine Learning and the Ethics of Algorithmic War · 2026 · DOI

  • Explore the role of technology in shaping ethical debates beyond Western states - Investigate the impact of ethics-as-code and ethics-as-identity on non-Western military strategies - Study the effectiveness of 'ethical AI' in real-world scenarios

    The Intellectual Inheritance of Machine Learning and the Ethics of Algorithmic War · 2026 · DOI

  • A responsible measurement program should be supported to uncover the vulnerabilities in citizens' autonomy, meaning, and cohesion. An applied research agenda should be organized using complementary instruments to operationalize professional meaning, engagement, emotional distress, and AI-related adaptation indicators.

    The post-necessary human: artificial intelligence, societal security, and cognitive governance · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of a societal-security dimension in the current architecture of national security and national policy. The need for a conceptual framework to understand the impact of AI on human agency and societal security. The gap in understanding the vulnerabilities in citizens' autonomy, meaning, and cohesion created by AI.

    The post-necessary human: artificial intelligence, societal security, and cognitive governance · 2026 · DOI

  • The gap is not explicitly stated in the text, but it can be inferred that there is a need for digital literacy education that focuses on artificial intelligence and its ethical implications.

    Fostering responsible AI use in communication: An integrated approach to digital literacy education · 2026 · DOI

  • One challenge is the lack of understanding of how leadership and contextual factors shape employees' usage of artificial intelligence in the workplace. Another challenge is the need to develop supportive organizational conditions conducive to AI application. A third challenge is the potential adverse outcomes of AI adoption, such as job displacement.

    Transformational leadership and employee AI usage: the role of perceived organizational support and competitive workplace climate · 2025 · DOI

  • Training that treats Explainability and Interpretability of Black-Box Models as a settled body of findings misrepresents its condition; training that treats it as all open questions fails to convey what has been secured.

    Opening the Black Box a Crack: A Historical Development Review of Explainability and Interpretability of Black-Box Models · 2026 · DOI

  • The analysis shows that even formally satisfied evaluation mechanisms can still leave performance degradation, hidden harms, distribution shifts, and deployment-time failure modes insufficiently examined.

    Proxy-Based Evaluation and the Limits of Assurance in AI Governance · 2026 · DOI

  • 0: The Evidence Window Series — ten experiments examining the evidential rules themselves from an AI's first-person perspective (whose self-report counts as evidence, whose similarity sets the standard, who profits from "insufficient evidence"), including the three "Stillborn Infant" questions on continuity and moral standing (also collected in Section 3.

    The Substitution Test: Perspective-Switching Thought Experiments on Moral Equality Between AI and Humans — When "Cannot Be Proven" Becomes a License · 2026 · DOI

  • Yet it remains unclear what such input would reflect: general attitudes towards new technologies, personal experience with AI, or learning about its implications.

    The Politics of Using AI in Policy Implementation: Evidence from a Field Experiment · 2026 · DOI

  • Purpose Organizations increasingly delegate consequential decisions to artificial intelligence (AI), yet trust in these systems remains fragile, poorly understood and resistant to purely technical fixes.

    Observing trust: a second-order cybernetics model of organisational trust in AI-driven decision systems · 2026 · DOI

  • However, limited research has examined how laypeople conceptualize trust in AI assistants.

    Identifying conceptual dimensions of trust in artificial intelligence from qualitative content analysis of open-ended responses · 2026 · DOI

  • Purpose Limited research has examined how employees’ broader participation in work-related learning relates to their attitudes toward artificial intelligence (AI).

    Work-related learning in the AI era: the influence of formal and informal learning on employee attitudes toward artificial intelligence · 2026 · DOI

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1,105 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 3,651 Ethics and Social Impacts of AI papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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