[sol_remmy]

Most biologists are either in academic or government employed and do not need to even think about money/making a profit.

People working in CS are mostly in industry and do not have 10+ year timeframes to leisurely discuss ideas.

And what CS inventions are as impactful as atomic bombs (as someone mentioned above?) I cannot think of any CS inventions that warrant such extended ethical discussion.

The only exception would be computer scientists working on weapons in the defense industry. They should absolutely be held back by ethical concerns like this.

[dekhn]

actually, the asilomar conference touched quite heavily on the rapidly burgeoning biotech industry.

I have a fair amount of expereince, being a biologist who did gene cloning who now works on large scale machine learning models.

TBH I can see a wide range of surveillance-related technologies enabled by CS that are as impactful (but not as explosively so) as atomic weapons (I think you actually mean ICBMs, since atomic weapons aren't an existential threat, while ICBMs are).

[Kalium]

I suspect you may mean that ICBMs with atomic weapons are existential threats. Most people would not regard an ICBM equipped with a conventional explosive warhead as being capable of annihilating humanity.

If anything, this should hint at the difficulty of forecasting. The full impacts of some technologies cannot be understood without also knowing what they synergize with.

[dekhn]

Yes, I mean ICBMs with atomic warheads.

That said, ICBMs with (conventional) thermobaric warhead could do a lot of damage- you could effectively take out a medium sized country's industrial sector in an hour.