[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.