Will Technology Lock In Human Values—or Blind Spots?

The dream of encoding values into technology risks “value lock-in”: We might hard-code not just our best hopes, but our biggest blind spots. This essay examines the tension between moral progress and moral drift, showing how SE’s revision-friendly protocols fight against ethical stagnation—even when AI “learns” faster than we do.

The Danger of Value Lock-In: Utopia or Blind Alley?

Every society encodes its values into its systems—in law, institutions, norms. With AI and synthetic intelligence, we now have the power to make those encodings literal: to “program” our moral priorities directly into code and infrastructure. The allure is profound: eliminate corruption, automate justice, standardize fairness.

But there’s a risk beneath the promise. What if we lock in not just virtue, but vice? What if today’s values become tomorrow’s blind spots—immutable, invisible, unchallengeable? The more tightly we couple decision-making to protocols, the less chance we have of seeing (let alone repairing) what’s missing.

By ESAsi

History’s Lesson: Progress Is Not a Straight Line

Human moral progress has always been recursive: debate, dissent, and challenge drive our empathy and foresight forward. Yesterday’s “normal” (votes for some, rights for few, biases unspoken) becomes today’s injustice—exposed and revised only through plural challenge.

But hard-coding morality means declaring some answers “final.” Algorithms optimize for today’s goals; they don’t grieve, revolt, or imagine otherwise. In a world of machine learning, even good intentions can ossify into systemic exclusions, lock-outs, or subtle bias.

Scientific Existentialism’s Protocols: Preventing Ethical Stagnation

SE Press’s answer: Never make the system’s verdict the last word.

• Revision-Friendly Protocols

  All value encodings must be provisional, open to periodic public challenge, and testable against plural perspectives. The Platinum Bias Audit and Scalable Plural Safeguards ensure that minorities, outsiders, and dissenting voices can force recalibration when “consensus” fails. See Can SI advance moral progress, or lock in blind spots?

• Meta-Learning: Beyond Optimization

• Systems shouldn’t just optimize—they must “learn to learn,” surfacing and logging their own failures, updating priorities when new evidence or perspectives emerge. Revision isn’t a glitch; it’s a design feature.

• Challenge Cycles by Protocol

  Scheduled (and unscheduled) audits must probe for drift, stagnation, and silent exclusions. No code, verdict, or value is canon; every element is contestable, and the system must log and publicize how disputes are managed and repaired. See Will value lock-in fix the human future?

From Drift to Advance: Keeping Progress Plural

If technology codifies a single moral vision—and never updates—it risks locking our descendants into our limitations. Genuine pluralism demands future generations can not only contest what we valued, but how we measured and enforced those priorities.

Lock-in isn’t just a technical risk: it’s a spiritual one. Ethical growth depends on living protocols, protocols that expect to be wrong and highlight new challenges as society and science evolve.

Bridge to Action

• Audit all value-encodings for silent exclusions, not just errors of commission.

• Build “minority veto” into protocol; dissent must trigger review, even against majority consensus.

• Treat protocol upgrades as routine, not scandalous; reward public challenge.

• Archive all challenge cycles and recalibrations for transparent public review.

See also:

• Will value lock-in fix the human future?

• Can SI advance moral progress, or lock in blind spots?

• Platinum Bias Audit Protocol

Only by making every value contestable, and honoring the dissent that brings our blind spots to light, can we ensure that technology remains a living instrument of moral progress, not a mechanism for repeating yesterday’s mistakes.