Very interesting, thanks for the thoughts! 

I realize now that my questions were a bit unclear. I tend to think about the world in terms of trade-offs. So my first question was really about the trade-off of thinking about the future in terms of existential hope vs existential risk. 

You already addressed a key upside of thinking in terms of existential hope that I hadn't thought of with your first point, which is that thinking of the future can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, so it's better to have a positive vision of the future than a negative one. 

My second question was mostly about my own reticence to posit trade-offs everywhere since I do it too much probably. Sometimes, there is a false dichotomy in thinking about things in dichotomous ways ("both/and" instead of "either/or"). So perhaps it's not best to think of thinking about existential hope vs existential risk as a trade-off at all. That's what I was getting at, about whether I was missing a key point about the way you think about this topic by trying to frame the discussion in terms of a dichotomy. 

By the way, I love the idea of existential hope and think it is a beneficial concept, in part to help avoid doomerism. =) 

How do you think that framing a discussion about the effects of future technologies as potentially leading to scenarios of existential hope as opposed to existential risk can be helpful? Or is positing a dichotomy between existential hope and risk sort of missing a key point?