[mkasu]

While I think general awareness of ethics concerns is needed, I think it might also sometimes bias research directions in itself.

I.e., dealing with ethics concerns and/or ethics committees becomes a huge additional workload in itself, so the research is prioritized to minimize dealing with it.

For example, one might stop a research which might help to treat cancer but dealing with the necessary approvals for patient data makes it unfeasible. Instead you switch to a general purpose target domain where it suddenly (unintentionally) could be used for war instead, but being general purpose it does not need to be approved by the ethics committee..