Making Intelligence: Ethics, IQ, and ML Benchmarks

The ML community recognizes the importance of anticipating and mitigating the potential negative impacts of benchmark research. In this position paper, we argue that more attention needs to be paid to areas of ethical risk that lie at the technical and scientific core of ML benchmarks. We identify overlooked structural similarities between human IQ and ML benchmarks. Human intelligence and ML benchmarks share similarities in setting standards for describing, evaluating and comparing performance on tasks relevant to intelligence. This enables us to unlock lessons from feminist philosophy of science scholarship that need to be considered by the ML benchmark community. Finally, we outline practical recommendations for benchmark research ethics and ethics review.