Well, yes, if said moral truth is obvious in something an AI to young to your to realize the danger is likely to stumble upon by mistake. This doesn't seem all that likely, and if the AI isn't inescapably snared by the time it gets to realizing as much as we already have, then it can still sandbox any process that's exploring new arguments in any way relating to morality and shut them down if they show any sign of shifting values.
We know our level of intelligence is reachable while still disagreeing about morality, and especially after having read these posts it could easily implement failsafes like that at even lower levels.
I suppose you could build an AI that had both drives to self improve, and an extreme caution about accidentally changing its other values (although evolution doesn't seem to have built us that way). That gives you the welcome conclusion that the AI in question is potentially unfriendly, rather than the disturbing one that it is potentially self-correcting. But we already knew you could build unfriendly AIs if you want to: the question is whether the friendly or neutral AI you think you are building will turn on you, whether you can achive unfriendliness without carefully designing it in.
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.