To the Stars is an interesting universe in which AI alignment was solved (or, perhaps, made possible at all) via magical girl wish! Quoting (not really a spoiler since this is centuries in the past of the main story):
It’d be nice if, like Kekulé, I could claim to have some neat story, about a dream and some snake eating itself, but mine was more prosaic than that.
I had heard about the Pretoria Scandal, of course, on the day the news broke. To me, it was profoundly disturbing, enough that I ended up laying awake the whole night thinking about it.
It was an embarrassment and a shame that we had been building these intelligences, putting them in control of our machines, with no way to make sure that they would be friendly. It got people killed, and that machine, to its dying day, could never be made to understand what it had done wrong. Oh, it understood that we would disapprove, of course, but it never understood why.
As roboticists, as computer scientists, we had to do better. They had movies, back then, about an AI going rogue and slaughtering millions, and we couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t happen. We couldn’t. We were just tinkerers, following recipes that had magically worked before, with no understanding of why, or even how to improve the abysmal success rate.
I called a lab meeting the next day, but of course sitting around talking about it one more time didn’t help at all. People had been working on the problem for centuries, and one lab discussion wasn’t going to perform miracles.
That night, I stayed in late, pouring over the datasets with Laplace, [the lab AI,] all those countless AI memory dumps and activity traces, trying to find a pattern: something, anything, so that at least we could understand what made them tick.
Maybe it was the ten or something cups of coffee; I don’t know. It was like out of a fairy tale, you know? The very day after Pretoria, no one else in the lab, just me and Laplace talking, and a giant beaker of coffee, and all at once, I saw it. Laplace thought I was going crazy, I was ranting so much. It was so simple!¹
Except it wasn’t, of course. It was another year of hard work, slogging through it, trying to explain it properly, make sure we saw all the angles…
And I feel I must say here that it is an absolute travesty that the ACM does not recognize sentient machines as possible award recipients.² Laplace deserves that award as much as I do. It was the one that dug through and analyzed everything, and talked me through what I needed to know, did all the hard grunt work, churning away through the night for years and years. I mean, come on, it’s the Turing Award!
The MSY has confirmed that the timing of this insight corresponds strongly with a wish made on the same day. The contractee has requested that she remain anonymous.
The ACM removed this restriction in 2148.
— Interview with Vladimir Volokhov, Turing Award Recipient, 2146.
(The actual content of the alignment solution is elsewhere described to be something like a chain of AIs designing AIs via a mathematically-provable error-correcting framework, continuing until the output stabilized—for what it’s worth.)
To the Stars is an interesting universe in which AI alignment was solved (or, perhaps, made possible at all) via magical girl wish! Quoting (not really a spoiler since this is centuries in the past of the main story):
(The actual content of the alignment solution is elsewhere described to be something like a chain of AIs designing AIs via a mathematically-provable error-correcting framework, continuing until the output stabilized—for what it’s worth.)