[yellowapple]

> At what stage with the AGI be handed over to “the people”.

That's pretty much automatic if the AGI is free software trained on free data.

> I’m not being a prick on purpose

You ain't being a prick at all; they're questions worth asking. Their answers do depend on optimism, but said optimism ain't "blind" in the slightest; rather, the optimism is a prescription: a goal for which we should be striving, and which we should be keeping in mind in our slow march toward an AGI-enabled potentially-post-scarcity society.