In the analogy of nuclear bomb, it's more likely than not a public awareness of nuclear power would have prevented nuclear plant (the good thing), nuclear bomb (the bad thing) is extremely unlikely to not be developed anyway.
Maybe, it's hard to know for sure, just like it's hard to know now :)
I think that had nuclear physics been more obvious 50-200 years earlier, it may have lead to a lot more practical private-sector development. In the case of power generation, this is seriously beneficial.
How will private-sector AI turn out? Will they boot up sentient AIs in Docker, then discard them? Is that OK? Who even knows?
Imagine the public sentiment if mass media made people aware of the inevitability of the nuclear bomb 50 to 200 years in advance and people (not just the government) were actively working on developing it.