It's a false dichotomy and your constraint of "The constraint is that X is inevitable" I reject outright.

Invention/engineering/development... whatever you want to call it is in the end an act or series of acts.

You have the responsibility to act ethically. Abstracting or abdicating away your responsibility to act ethically is still unethical, no matter how may layers of "invention" or after the fact ethics you try and layer on top.

An easier example is the invention of nuclear weapons. The the grep bullshit is theoretical and hard to reason about.