"Experts have predicted 150 of the last 2 AI winters"

We could have an AI winter if we just banned AI research. The military would be tasked with confiscating the compute hardware.

I think that would 1) require a massive negative event cause by AI to cause a real reason for that ban and 2) that ban would be quite infeasible even on a national scale, let alone internationally.

Why would we do that?

How would we do that?

Banning research is just not feasible.

I wouldn’t want to do that. I know that I will be replaced by a machine and I am trying to optimize my personal life to cope for this as well as possible. Part of my personal steps include the amassing of vast wealth so I can avoid a slip into the plebeian UBI class, who will have no agency at all.

Now, If you wanted to resist that and give humanity a few more hundred years, you would clog the bottlenecks on AI progress, which are research talent, data and compute.

If you marched the police into NeurIPS and the military into the datacenters, and you coordinated with other large countries to do the same, and you strongarmed those countries that resisted to do the same, you could get pretty darn far. We humans have managed to greatly slow down the rollout of nuclear technology. We may be able to do the same with AI, if someone figures out which political movement will get into power next, and tells them to read the enlightened writings of Elizier Yudkowsky.

I would also like an “Extinction Rebellion” or “Just Stop Oil” style movement against the artificial intelligence industry, as I appreciate their rebellious and leftist aesthetics.

The current AI algorithms are based on gathering lots of data and using fast processors and memory to get the functions we want.

We are getting to the limits of how fast hardware can be and we are rapidly processing thru available cheap data. At some point it's going to get very expensive to gather data and increase hardware speed.

We'll a see a few years of excitement,(5yrs?,10yrs?) but it will stop until the next big breakthrough. Hopefully there will be one but nothing is guaranteed. That's the AI winter I'm talking about.

AI will have an impact but it won't be the singularity type that some people dream about. Think of the automation of work that happened during the industrial revolution. Now, think of it for white collar work. There are a lot of white collar work that the current AI can automate but it won't be everything and it won't take over to rule over us.