On the one hand people take this topic very serious, the most important topic indeed, yet seem to be very relaxed about the only organisation involved in shaping the universe.
"The only organisation involved in shaping the universe"?!? WTF? These folks have precious little in terms of resources. They apparently haven't even started coding yet. You yourself assign them a miniscule chance of succeeding at their project. How could they possibly be the "the only organisation involved in shaping the universe"?!?
They apparently haven't even started coding yet.
Really? Even if they were working on a merely difficult problem, you would expect coding to be the very last step of the project. People don't solve hard algorithmic problems by writing some code and seeing what happens. I wouldn't expect an organization working optimally on AGI to write any code until after making some remarkable progress on the problem.
How could they possibly be the "the only organisation involved in shaping the universe"?!?
There could easily be no organization at all tryin...
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?