Coherent Extrapolated Volition was a term developed by Eliezer Yudkowsky while discussing Friendly AI development. It’s meant as an argument that it would not be sufficient to explicitly program what we think our desires and motivations are into an AI, instead, we should find a way to program it in a way that it would act in our best interests – what we want it to do and not what we tell it to.

Related: Friendly AI, Metaethics Sequence, Complexity of Value

In calculating CEV, an AI would predict what an idealized version of us would want, "if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together". It would recursively iterate this prediction for humanity as a whole, and determine the desires which converge. This initial dynamic would be used to generate the AI's utility function. 

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