Distributing influence over humanity’s future is not only morally preferable to the programming team implementing their own favorite vision, it is also a way to reduce the incentive to fight over who gets to create the first superintelligence. In the CEV approach, the programmers (or their sponsors) exert no more influence over the content of the outcome than any other person—though they of course play a starring causal role in determining the structure of the extrapolation and in deciding to implement humanity’s CEV instead of some alternative.
