Finally, it's hard to make an AGI if the rest of humanity thinks you're a supervillain, and anyone making an AGI based on a value system other than CEV most certainly is, so you're better off being the sort of researcher who would incorporate all humanity's values than the sort of researcher who wouldn't.
Good point. But that can only work if your research is transparent. Otherwise, why would one believe you are not just signaling this attitude while secretly pursuing your selfish goals? That is the reason why governments get the complete source code of software products from companies like Microsoft.
In the context of machine intelligence, I reckon that means open-source software.
I figure, if you try and keep your source code secret, only fools will trust you. More to the point, competing organisations - who are more willing to actually share their results - are likely to gain mindshare, snowball, and succeed first.
Of course, it doesn't always work like that. There's a lot of secret sauce out there - especially server-side. However, for ethical coders, this seems like a no-brainer to me.
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?