Seeking power to dominate others is almost always instrumentally rational.

Einstein wrote a letter urging the United States to start a nuclear weapons program. Surely he would have wanted to be powerful enough to dominate and defeat the Nazis.

Everyone wants to be powerful, if only to protect their family and end world hunger.

Jews literally used their superior intelligence to create a super-weapon to prevent their far more numerous arch-enemies from annihilating them (Szilard, Oppenheimer, Teller, Ulam, etc.). They only didn't do it themselves because they were not super-intelligent as individuals, and they lacked the coordination skills necessary to prevail against a much larger opponent without their own state.

So why did people like Einstein and von Neumann not become rich and powerful? Because they were able to exert more influence by doing basic research than by going into politics or becoming rich. No one remembers the names of historically rich people, but everyone knows the names of famous mathematicians or physicists like Pythagoras and Newton.

Individual humans don't become dominators because they don't want to, but because they can't. Humans are fundamentally limited by their wetware. Humans cannot easily experiment on themselves or make copies, which fundamentally limits their ability to undergo recursive self-improvement.

Students already take drugs like Ritalin and Adderall to help them focus. If they could create autistic copies of themselves that could focus perfectly on a subgoal while they are partying, they would. Who wouldn't? Or imagine being able to talk to billions of people at once like ChatGPT. Who would forgo this ability?