If Archimedes and the American happen to extrapolate to the same volition, why should that be because the American has values that are a progression from those of Archimedes? It's logically possible that both are about the same distance from their shared extrapolated volition, but they share one because they are both human. Archimedes could even have values that are closer than the American's.
The extrapolated volition of a cultural group might, given certain assumptions, resolve to a single set of values. If that were the case, you could express changes in expressed volition in that group over time as either progress toward or regression from that EV, and for various reasons I'd expect them to usually favor the "progress" option. I suspect that's what cousin_it is getting at.
I'm not convinced that we gain anything by expressing that in simple terms of progress, though. The expressed volition of modern Western society is probably cl...
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?