If by "morality gates" you're talking about about an ethical filter that all intelligent machine actions have to go through, this can't be "one of the first hur

If by "morality gates" you're talking about about an ethical filter that all intelligent machine actions have to go through, this can't be "one of the first hurdles" because such a filter would need to be a powerful AI application itself. And there's no guarantee that self-imposed limitations will always be applied. Someone could just rewrite and recompile without the filters turned on. Imagine if the US could have built in "morality gates" to the first nuclear weapons. That wouldn't have stopped other countries from building the weapons without the restrictions. And we know software is infinitely configurable and modifiable if you have the source code.