This a tough one, since researchers don't control how their technology is used.

And it's very difficult for even the experts to balance the positives against the negatives: facial recognition could be used to find a serial killer ... or a missing child.

As one example, RMS has long advocated against the "ethics" of certain technologies and companies, while Emacs and GCC have greatly accelerated the adoption of technology, generally. And those tools have almost certainly been used directly or indirectly to build some very, very bad things.