The thing I've never understood about CEV is how the AI can safely read everyone's brain. The whole point of CEV is that the AI is unsafe unless it has a human value system, but before it can get one, it has to open everyones heads and scan their brains!? That doesn't sound like something I'd trust a UFAI to do properly.
I bring this up because without knowing how the CEV is supposed to occur it is hard to analyse this post. I also agree with JoshuaZ that this didn't deserve a top-level post.
The C in CEV stands for Coherent, not Collective. You should not think of CEV output as occurring through brute-force simulation of everyone on Earth. The key step is to understand the cognitive architecture of human decision-making in the abstract. The AI has to find the right concepts (the analogues of utility function, terminal values, etc). Then it is supposed to form a rational completion and ethical idealization of the actual architecture, according to criteria already implicit in that architecture. Only then does it apply the resulting decision procedure to the contingent world around us.
It’s the year 2045, and Dr. Evil and the Singularity Institute have been in a long and grueling race to be the first to achieve machine intelligence, thereby controlling the course of the Singularity and the fate of the universe. Unfortunately for Dr. Evil, SIAI is ahead in the game. Its Friendly AI is undergoing final testing, and Coherent Extrapolated Volition is scheduled to begin in a week. Dr. Evil learns of this news, but there’s not much he can do, or so it seems. He has succeeded in developing brain scanning and emulation technology, but the emulation speed is still way too slow to be competitive.
There is no way to catch up with SIAI's superior technology in time, but Dr. Evil suddenly realizes that maybe he doesn’t have to. CEV is supposed to give equal weighting to all of humanity, and surely uploads count as human. If he had enough storage space, he could simply upload himself, and then make a trillion copies of the upload. The rest of humanity would end up with less than 1% weight in CEV. Not perfect, but he could live with that. Unfortunately he only has enough storage for a few hundred uploads. What to do…
Ah ha, compression! A trillion identical copies of an object would compress down to be only a little bit larger than one copy. But would CEV count compressed identical copies to be separate individuals? Maybe, maybe not. To be sure, Dr. Evil gives each copy a unique experience before adding it to the giant compressed archive. Since they still share almost all of the same information, a trillion copies, after compression, just manages to fit inside the available space.
Now Dr. Evil sits back and relaxes. Come next week, the Singularity Institute and rest of humanity are in for a rather rude surprise!