I refer you again to the essay; it's not inevitable that those with substantially more money than us should get to dominate us and define our future. They are but a tiny minority, and if/when enough of us see that future as not going our way, we can and will collectively withdraw our consent for the social and economic rules and structures which enable those oligarchs.

Currently, AI is improved through concerted human effort and energy-intensive investments. Without that human interest and effort, progress in the field would slow.

But even if AI development continues unabated, nothing is forcing us to deploy AI in ways that reduce our quality of life. We have a choice over how it's used in our society because we are the ones who are building that society.

>Would you say the industrial revolution would have been able to be stopped by enough humans not wanting to achieve it?

Yes, let's start in early 1800s England: subsistence farmers were pushed off the land by the enclosure acts and, upon becoming landless, flocked to urban areas to work in factories. The resulting commodified market of mobile laborers enabled the rise of capitalism.

So let's say these pre-industrial subsistence farmers had instead chosen to identify with the working class Chartism movement of the mid-1800s and joined in a general strike against the landed classes who controlled parliament. In that case, the industrial revolution, lacking a sufficiently pliable workforce, might have been halted, or at least occurred in a more controlled way that minimized human suffering.