Ah, it seems we have different ideas about what human values actually are.
Wait wait wait. Are we talking about human values, or human universal values? Those seem to me to be different concepts. It seems to me that what we have in common is that we're competing with one another and what differs between humans is how we compete and what we seek to maximize.
I think the difference between my approach to music and a musician's approach to music is more than a difference of degree, and so am reluctant to say we share the same value. Given the many differing attitudes towards justice, it seems more apt to call it a political ploy about precedents than one objective standard all humans strive towards. I could keep going, but hopefully two examples is sufficient. Human values seem to be individual values, first and foremost.
And when we remove some human values- predation, cruelty, rape, domination- from the list because their time has passed, it is not clear to me why the others remain. If we alter ourselves so we no longer understand events as narratives (since that's a motherlode of bias right there), will literature be a casualty of that improvement?
Agreed that individual humans have differing values. However I believe there's more to say about human universal values than "we're competing with one another". Here are two pieces of evidence:
(1) Almost all human cultures have what we recognize as art. So far as I know, chimpanzee cultures do not. (Although a quick google search tells me that chimps who live in human cultures do create art.) So art, broadly defined, is universal; but individual humans have more specific tastes. I expect humans and chimpanzees have senses of justice (differing fr...
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?