Thank you for being so open about your experiences. They mirror my own in many ways. Knowing that there are others feeling the same definitely helps me coping with my anxieties and doubts. Thank you also for organizing that event last June!

I think the term has many “valid” uses, and one is to refer to an object level belief that things will likely turn out pretty well. It doesn’t need to be irrational by definition.

Agreed. Like I said, you may have used the term in a way different from my definition. But I think in many cases, the term does reflect an attitude like I defined it. See Wikipedia.

I also think AI safety experts are self selected to be more pessimistic

This may also be true. In any case, I hope that Quintin and you are right and I'm wrong. But that doesn't make me sleep better.

From Wikipedia: "Optimism is an attitude reflecting a belief or hope that the outcome of some specific endeavor, or outcomes in general, will be positive, favorable, and desirable." I think this is close to my definition or at least includes it. It certainly isn't the same as a neutral view.

Thanks for pointing this out! I agree that my defintion of "optimism" is not the only way one can use the term. However, from my experience (and like I said, I am basically an optimist), in a highly uncertain situation, the weighing of perceived benefits vs risks heavily influences ones probability estimates. If I want to found a start-up, for example, I convince myself that it will work. I will unconsciously weigh positive evidence higher than negative. I don't know if this kind of focusing on the positiv outcomes may have influenced your reasoning and your "rosy" view of the future with AGI, but it has happened to me in the past. 

"Optimism" certainly isn't the same as a neutral, balanced view of possibilities. It is an expression of the belief that things will go well despite clear signs of danger (e.g. the often expressed concerns of leading AI safety experts). If you think your view is balanced and neutral, maybe "optimism" is not the best term to use. But then I would have expected much more caveats and expressions of uncertainty in your statements.

Also, even if you think you are evaluating the facts unbiased and neutral, there's still the risk that others who read your texts will not, for the reaons I mention above.

Defined well, dominance would be the organizing principle, the source, of an entity's behavior. 

I doubt that. Dominance is the result, not the cause of behavior. It comes from the fact that there are conflicts in the world and often, only one side can get its will (even in a compromise, there's usually a winner and a loser). If an agent strives for dominance, it is usually as an instrumental goal for something else the agent wants to achieve. There may be a "dominance drive" in some humans, but I don't think that explains much of actual dominant behavior. Even among animals, dominant behavior is often a means to an end, for example getting the best mating partners or the largest share of food.

I also think the concept is already covered in game theory, although I'm not an expert. 

That "troll" runs one of the most powerful AI labs and freely distributes LLMs on the level of state-of-the-art half a year ago on the internet. This is not just about someone talking nonsense in public, like Melanie Mitchell or Steven Pinker. LeCun may literally be the one who contributes most to the destruction of humanity. I would give everything I have to convince him that what he's doing is dangerous. But I have no idea how to do that if even his former colleagues Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio can't.

I think even most humans don't have a "dominance" instinct. The reasons we want to gain money and power are also mostly instrumental: we want to achieve other goals (e.g., as a CEO, getting ahead of a competitor to increases shareholder value and make a "good job"), impress our neighbors, generally want to be admired and loved by others, live in luxury, distract ourselves from other problems like getting older, etc. There are certainly people who want to dominate just for the feeling of it, but I think that explains only a small part of the actual dominant behavior in humans. I myself have been a CEO of several companies, but I never wanted to "dominate" anyone. I wanted to do what I saw as a "good job" at the time, achieving the goals I had promised our shareholders I would try to achieve.

Thanks for pointing this out! I should have made it clearer that I did not use ChatGPT to come up with a criticism, then write about it. Instead, I wanted to see if even ChatGPT was able to point out the flaws in LeCun's argument, which seemed obvious to me. I'll edit the text accordingly.

Like I wrote in my reply to dr_s, I think a proof would be helpful, but probably not a game changer.

Mr. CEO: "Senator X, the assumptions in that proof you mention are not applicable in our case, so it is not relevant for us. Of course we make sure that assumption Y is not given when we build our AGI, and assumption Z is pure science-fiction."

What the AI expert says to Xi Jinping and to the US general in your example doesn't rely on an impossibility proof in my view.