2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The world is currently experiencing an exciting juxtaposition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and humanity, leading to a global vision of Society 5.0. This is centered around a human-oriented society that integrates digital technology and physical spaces to solve complex social and environmental challenges. A hallmark attribute of Education 5.0 (E.D. 5.0) is the emergence of an AI-empowered Virtual Reality (VR) environment called a digital twin, which allows personalized content learning and immersive experiences. However, an unintended but existent consequence of this is the morphing of individual and collective societal ethics. In fact, user ethics and morality patterns are assessed and trained on by a digital twin to suggest content that the user is more likely to consume. Across universities and Higher Education Institutes (HEIs), this has necessitated an urgent curriculum revamp, especially at the undergraduate level. Thus, it becomes imperative to capture and comprehensively assess the exact impacts of AI on shaping ethics, which collectively shape mankind’s direction towards Society 5.0. Based on strategically posed Research Questions (RQs) arising from a detailed literature review, an exhaustive bibliometric analysis was executed on the Scopus scientific database, with duplicates being removed via suitable Inclusion & Exclusion criteria, from 2018 (the start of the Fifth Industrial Revolution) to 2025 (present day). A trickle-down approach is presented in our analysis, and our co-citation network maps capture collective (big picture) trends before narrowing down to more specific roles of ethics in shaping engineering education, particularly across STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Analysis of data reveals a direct impact of ethics in shaping engineering education-assisted revamp of university curricula across HEIs, with the United States and the United Kingdom emerging as key players from the Global North, and India and China emerging as major players from the Global South. We observe a linear increase in publications on ethics, with the top contributing fields being Computer Science, Engineering, Materials Science, and Business, Management, and Accounting. As HEIs adapt to create curricula that build Industry 5.0 (I.D. 5.0) skillsets among enrolled students, understanding the pivotal role of ethics in an AI-based digital twin environment can help faculty and instructors design new /revamp existing courses with more mindfulness. By teaching content from a lens of inculcating E.D. 5.0 competencies and I.D. 5.0 skillsets, HEIs can produce university graduates who possess a strong ethical framework, while simultaneously being proficient at AI awareness/usage. The long-term vision of this work is truly transformative, and aims to produce a pedagogical blueprint towards the conscious teaching of ethics across universities and academic environments, in a manner that successfully encapsulates undergraduate/graduate student learning based on Bloom’s taxonomy, in turn inspiring educators to design more Society 5.0-aligned content, in accordance with the tenets of Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning.