Eliezer's personal desire might be to implement CEV of humanity (whatever it turns out to be). I believe, however, that for well over 99% of humans this would not be the best possible outcome they might desire.
I'm not clear on what you could mean by this. Do you mean that you think the process just doesn't work as advertised, so that 99% of human beings end up definitely unhappy and with there existing some compromise state that they would all have preferred to CEV? Or that 99% of human beings all have different maxima so that their superposition is not the maximum of any one of them, but there is no single state that a supermajority prefers to CEV?
Or that 99% of human beings all have different maxima so that their superposition is not the maximum of any one of them, but there is no single state that a supermajority prefers to CEV?
Yes. I expect CEV, if it works as advertised, to lead to a state that almost all humans (as they are today, with no major cognitive changes) would see as an acceptable compromise, an improvement over things today, but far worse than their personal desires implemented at the expense of the rest of humankind.
Therefore, while working on CEV of humanity might be a good compr...
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?