For example, should mankind vigorously pursue research on how to make Ron Fouchier's alteration of the H5N1 bird flu virus even more dangerous and deadly to humans, because “higher safety can only be achieved by more research on all related topics”?

That's not really anyone's proposal. Humans will probably just continue full-steam-ahead on machine intelligence research. There will be luddite-like factions hissing and throwing things - but civilisation is used to that. What we may see is governments with the technology selfishly attempting to stem their spread - in a manner somewhat resembling the NSA crypto-wars.