In the real world, never once has the march of technology been successfully stopped, no matter how many jobs it crushed. Even the luddites who are enjoying a historical "re-evaluation" today still lost. And we've been through society spanning destruction of livelihoods before too and didn't stop it then either, just look at how much of the population used to be employed in farming and agriculture and compare it to now. Automation came and destroyed all of those livelihoods too.
In the real world, we can't even stop countries from pursuing, developing and improving nuclear weaponry despite the fact that we know it is an existential threat, and nuclear weaponry has no uses at all outside of nuclear annihilation. If we can't stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, what makes you think we have even a snowball's chance in hell of stopping AI development when AI actually has non-world ending uses and benefits to people?
I'm happy to talk about the "real world" and in the real world, we're repeating the same mistakes of the past thinking "surely this time will be different" instead of learning from those mistakes and trying something new.