[onceKnowable]

It’s not about holding particular people responsible in hindsight.

It’s about having a public debate to decide what laws are needed to robustly protect the public before the technology is even misused.

So in your examples it’d be:

- when the physicists inform the public, MAD is quickly determined as the outcome of that technology and laws made to prevent nukes being made in the first place. (And optimistically, to negate wars ever happening again due to the possibility that an aggrieved side might develop nukes) Or, because the public debate did not happen until after they were developed and deployed, to allow nukes to be developed and defer wars between nuke-enabled countries to hyper-diplomacy while making every effort to restrict development & deployment, like we currently have.

- when the chemists alert the public that chemical weapons are possibly far more effective than anyone ever imagined, then laws are made to ban their deployment. As is currently the case after informed public debate. But instead of informed public debate before the fact, millions were gassed during WW1.

- when the bureaucrats realist they can identify large swathes of the population unrestricted, laws can be brought in to restrict data gathering to protect the public from such actions.

In all of your examples, an informed public debate could have urged politicians to create laws to robustly protect the public from these technologies.

The key note to realize is that the public debate will happen. It’s inevitable. The key role that the creators of these technologies can play is to raise these ethical concerns before harm is risked. Even though the public debate did not happen until after all of the above technologies were misused, they resulted in swiftly creating laws to robustly protect the public from that technology. Delaying the debate does nothing other than risking disaster.

I know that last line sounds like hyperbolic exaggeration but it’s an inevitability that, if ignored, is unethical.

[Kalium]

It's also worth considering that the public might decide that all this mucking around with injecting people with virii sounds like trying to kill us all. So vaccine use gets banned, and lots of people die from preventable diseases.

Or maybe a town refuses to flouridate their water after a series of propaganda campaigns convinces people there that it's toxic and will ruin the purity of their water system.

I understand why you cast it as you do. History is chock full of preventable abuses! Yet, it's worth considering that such things can backfire as well. Public debate is not a panacea, and policy is often rushed and poorly formed to satisfy atavistic fears. A public debate can easily urge politicians to robustly protect the public from imagined threats while enabling real ones.

[onceKnowable]

Only if the whole population succumbs to ignorance. Not saying that doesn’t happen, especially in light of stuff like net neutrality and the NSA et al’s data gathering.

But on the whole, the general public will drown out cranks who shout about imagines threats like fluoride or vaccines. The science on both is clear.

Likewise, I’m optimistic that the negative realities of net neutrality stifling startups and the mass data-gathering will become so apparent to future generations of lawmakers & voters that they’ll be reversed in due course.