Suppose we get the funding, find the people, pull together the project, solve the technical problems of AI and Friendly AI, carry out the required teaching, and finally set a superintelligence in motion, all before anyone else throws something together that only does recursive self-improvement. It is still pointless if we do not have a nice task for that optimization process to carry out.
That’s not how the term is used here. Friendliness is prior to and separate from CEV, if I understand it correctly.
From the CEV document: