Counterpoint: CRISPR only reignited what was already a real fear of reduced difficulty and costs of engineering deadly pathogens.
In fact, what you and GP wrote is baffling to me. The way I see it, biotech is stupidly obviously self-evidently dangerous, because let's look at the facts:
- Genetic engineering gets easier and cheaper and more "democratized"; in the last 10 years, the basics were already accessible to motivated schools and individual hobbyists;
- We already know enough, with knowledge accessible at the hobbyist level, to know how to mix and match stuff and get creative - see "synthetic biology";
- The substrate we're working with is self-replicating molecular nanotechnology; more than that, it's usually exactly the type that makes people get sick - bacteria (because they're most versatile nanobots) and viruses (because they're natural code injection systems).
Above is the "inside view"; for "outside view", I'll just say this: the fact that "lab leak" hypothesis of COVID-19 was (or still is?) considered to be one of the most likely explanations for the pandemics already tells you that the threat is real, and consequences are dire.
I don't know how can you possibly look at that and conclude "nah, not dangerous, needs to be democratized so the Evil Elites don't hoard it all".
There must be some kind of inverse "just world fallacy" fallacy of blaming everything on evil elites and 1%-ers that are Out To Get Us. Or maybe it's just another flavor of the NWO conspiracy thinking, except instead the Bildenbergs and the Jews its Musk, Bezos and the tech companies.
Same is, IMHO, with AI. Except that one is more dangerous because it's a technology-using technology - that is, where e.g. accidentally or intentionally engineered pathogens could destroy civilization directly, AI could do it by using engineered pathogens - or nukes, or mass manipulation, or targeted manipulation, or ... countless other things.
EDIT:
And if you ask "why, if it's really so easy to access and dangerous, we haven't already been killed by engineered pathogens?", the answer is a combination of:
1. vast majority of people not bearing ill intent;
2. vast majority of people being not interested and not able to perform (yet!) this kind of "nerdy thing";
3. a lot of policing and regulatory attention given to laboratories and companies playing with anything that could self-replicate and spread rapidly;
4. well-developed policies and capacity for dealing with bio threats (read: infectious diseases, and diseases in general);
5. this being still new enough that the dangerous and the careless don't have an easy way to do what in theory they already could.
Note that despite 4. (and 3., if you consider "lab leak" a likely possibility), COVID-19 almost brought the world down.