By the way, the hard part of killing humanity at this point is automating the economy, not actually killing us.
Yes; and ironically this is the part where humans will be quite happy to cooperate.
You don’t even need to automate the entire economy, only the parts that you (AI) need. For example, you could ignore food production, movie production, medicine, etc., and focus on computers, transport, mining, weapons, etc. Perhaps this doesn’t make much of a difference—if you automate all the parts you need, you might as well automate everything, it may even be less suspicious. Or you could do some social engineering, and try to convince humans that the things you need are low-status, and the things you don’t need are high-status, so they will be happy to drop out of industry and focus on education and art and medicine (you need to give them the feeling that they are in control of something important).
With army, you just need to make sure you can stop it from destroying the industry and your computing centers. If you have enough control, you can simply hide the computing centers—keep the old ones (to make humans think they have a target), and build the new ones (more powerful) somewhere else. Half of them in Antarctica where there are no humans around, the other half under the most populated cities (so the humans will hesitate to drop nukes on them).
One possible way to kill humans is to discourage them from meeting in person (work from home; communicate on social networks), and then you can simply murder them one by one and keep simulating the murdered ones, so that their friends and colleagues won’t notice. Yes, there will be groups of people that meet in person, such as families; you take out the entire group at a time.
I suspect that drones + poison may be surprisingly effective. You only need one small-ish facility to make a powerful poison or bioweapon that drones can spread everywhere or just sneak into the water supply. Once 90% of humans are dead, the remainder can be mopped up.
Way harder to be able to keep things running once we’re gone.
Yes; and ironically this is the part where humans will be quite happy to cooperate.
You don’t even need to automate the entire economy, only the parts that you (AI) need. For example, you could ignore food production, movie production, medicine, etc., and focus on computers, transport, mining, weapons, etc. Perhaps this doesn’t make much of a difference—if you automate all the parts you need, you might as well automate everything, it may even be less suspicious. Or you could do some social engineering, and try to convince humans that the things you need are low-status, and the things you don’t need are high-status, so they will be happy to drop out of industry and focus on education and art and medicine (you need to give them the feeling that they are in control of something important).
With army, you just need to make sure you can stop it from destroying the industry and your computing centers. If you have enough control, you can simply hide the computing centers—keep the old ones (to make humans think they have a target), and build the new ones (more powerful) somewhere else. Half of them in Antarctica where there are no humans around, the other half under the most populated cities (so the humans will hesitate to drop nukes on them).
One possible way to kill humans is to discourage them from meeting in person (work from home; communicate on social networks), and then you can simply murder them one by one and keep simulating the murdered ones, so that their friends and colleagues won’t notice. Yes, there will be groups of people that meet in person, such as families; you take out the entire group at a time.
I suspect that drones + poison may be surprisingly effective. You only need one small-ish facility to make a powerful poison or bioweapon that drones can spread everywhere or just sneak into the water supply. Once 90% of humans are dead, the remainder can be mopped up.
Way harder to be able to keep things running once we’re gone.