"Ayn Rand? Aleister Crowley? How exactly do you get there? What Rubicons do you cross? It's not the justifications I'm interested in, but the critical moments of thought."

Do you want to know the critical moments of thought so you can shape an AI that will not have them? I think Ayn Rand's key realization was that concepts can have interdependencies.

For example, if you don't already have the concept "property" then no matter how many concrete examples of stealing you see, you won't be able to form the concept "stealing." You won't be able to "see" what they're doing without that earlier knowledge, you will just see them as people moving stuff around.

Then at some point she realized the same kind of dependency relationship exists between "value" and "life," and that it implies something about what the standard of value must be.

But then, worse case, if an AI did discover this, and follow the same path, it would not become a selfish psychopath. It would conclude that since it is not alive, the concept "value" does not apply to it. Therefore the only reason to perform any act at all is if it helps us, the living.