One of the justifications for CEV was that extrapolating from an American in the 21st century and from Archimedes of Syracuse should give similar results.
I hadn't seen this before, but it strikes me as irredeemably silly. If we're picking a specific person (or set of people) from antiquity to compare, are we doing so randomly? If so, the results will be horrifying. If not, then we're picking them according to some standard- and why don't we just encapsulate that standard directly?
Here's a quote from the CEV paper:
In poetic terms, our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together;
If Archimedes (or a random person) could live for a thousand years (together with the rest of humanity), could think a billion times faster, could learn all the FAI knows, etc, etc, then they'd very likely arrive at the same answer as a modern person. So it shouldn't matter which person/people you pick. This is how the extrapolation is supposed to work.
Taken from some old comments of mine that never did get a satisfactory answer.
1) One of the justifications for CEV was that extrapolating from an American in the 21st century and from Archimedes of Syracuse should give similar results. This seems to assume that change in human values over time is mostly "progress" rather than drift. Do we have any evidence for that, except saying that our modern values are "good" according to themselves, so whatever historical process led to them must have been "progress"?
2) How can anyone sincerely want to build an AI that fulfills anything except their own current, personal volition? If Eliezer wants the the AI to look at humanity and infer its best wishes for the future, why can't he task it with looking at himself and inferring his best idea to fulfill humanity's wishes? Why must this particular thing be spelled out in a document like CEV and not left to the mysterious magic of "intelligence", and what other such things are there?