How to design an exterminator AI

From OpenArt.ai

Posted here as a service to those misanthropists who wish to exterminate the human race, but lack the necessary strategic vision.

---

First, don't go the pure AI route. You'll find that it's orders of magnitude easier to engineer a bunch of gain-of-function viral pathogens and let them loose. In fact, lose the idea of the dangers of high-intelligence entirely. Plenty of highly-intelligent people died in prison cells or death camps. An enhanced capacity for abstract thought only takes you so far.

To make humanity, or any species, extinct, you have to change the parameters of that species’ environment to ensure subsequent reproduction tends to zero.

A simple approach is to drop a sufficiently large rock on the planet. But sometimes the introduction of a new, invasive species is enough to do the trick - rats introduced onto a hitherto-pristine island is a well-known case study. 

Could you use advanced AI to enable a lethal threat to humanity? Create a new species to occupy our human niche, preventing humans in their totality from continuing?

Some of you will say that the TFR data shows that capitalism and contraception are already taking us way down that path. But not all humans will be affected: those who disdain such will inherit the Earth - a future paradise for the Amish (h/t Robin Hanson).

Putting both viruses and progressive antinatalism to one side, what people really want to hear about, it seems, are killer robots.

They're hard. 

It's easy to design a substantial point-threat: AI autonomous weapons for example. It's another thing to design a universal, all-consuming threat which prevails over any and all human countermeasures.

All existing AI systems - all our technological products - are strictly parasitic on our existing human global economy. Without that they can't power themselves, repair themselves or reproduce themselves. 

In principle, we can imagine a totally self-reproducing robot community-economy. If it had sufficient means of military aggression and defence, then we're simply positing a species like ourselves (in some possibly improved variant) implemented in metal/silicon or protoplasm depending on the engineering pros and cons.

Since we would be competing in-niche for land, resources and sources of energy, we would have to fight these aliens for our survival. But defeat is not foredoomed, not if we were paying attention all along.

In any case, I say to the misanthropes out there, we are centuries away from that future. You won't live to conceptualise, let alone design, that possible road to human extinction.

My advice? Stick to the viruses. 

Or go design the irresistible (but sterile) android life-partners - trust me, no one will stop you there.