I also work in computer vision (for biological sciences). I use deep convnets ev...

I also work in computer vision (for biological sciences). I use deep convnets every day, and certainly they are increasingly central in biology (https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00421), proteomics (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3837439/, https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaFold-Using-AI-for-sci...), astronomy (https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05965), chemistry (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-019-0086-7, https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/sc/c8sc0...), many other sciences. I think it's great, they're enabling progress in lots of really tough scientific problems. And for what it's worth, people are still doing horrible things to mice, salamanders, zebrafish, haha, being a model organism is not a good gig, but of course it's still a huge part of neuroscience...

Personally, I don't think that an interest in the social impacts of one's work as a researcher should be considered hype -- shouldn't one be interested in their impact on the world? For computer vision in particular, these systems are widely deployed. Also, they are just part of a larger apparatus of automatic decision systems that everyone now interacts with every single day, from getting your insurance rates to getting a loan to... Those have now become prosaic too -- certainly not scifi.