> I work within a university and socially impactful research goes through rigerous ethics committees before being approved

This is a gross exaggeration. Only a small portion of academic research requires IRB approval, and it's mostly limited to experiments on humans or animals.

If we were to start requiring IRB pre-approval for all research that might be "socially impactful", it would be the end of progress as we know it.

The first step would be to determine what counts as "socially impactful". You couldn't limit it to just AI. What about security and privacy? Why not all of CS? And then, why not Economics or History?

Source: worked for various universities doing research, first as graduate assistant, then scientist, then tenure-track professor, for 19 or 20 years.