Personally I would much prefer the former - and I'm not a SIAI volunteer or donor (although I could then become one).
Fair enough, but I was talking about your gut level reaction as a proxy for the rest of humanity's gut level reaction. You may not have the reaction, but most of the rest of the world would see "CEV for only us" and think mad scientist/doomsday cult/etc. because the pattern fits.
Most of the world are going to see the words "AI" and "Singularity", think mad scientist, and send troops. The word "CEV" they're going to ignore, because it's unfamiliar and the media won't tell them what it is.
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?