Ethics: What is the Research Scenario in the Brazilian Conference BRACIS?

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents many ethical dilemmas, such as explainability, bias, military uses, surveillance capitalism, employment, and jobs. In the scientific context, AI can lead us to a crisis of reproducibility spread across several areas of knowledge and guide mathematicians to solve high complexity problems. Both companies and government forward their guidelines, recommendations, and materials combining Ethics and AI. In this paper, we investigate the involvement of the Brazilian academic-scientific community with moral or ethical aspects through its publications, covering the Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems (BRACIS) as the most prominent Brazilian AI conference. Through a Literature Systematic Review method, we answer the main research question: what is the panorama of the explicit occurrence of ethical aspects in the BRACIS, ENIAC, and STIL conference papers? The results indicate a low occurrence of ethical aspects and increasing behavior over the years. Ethical deliberation was fruitful, constructive, and critical among these few occurrences. Whether in the Brazilian or international context, there are spaces to be filled and open opportunities for exploration along this path.