Um, has anyone here played the Mass Effect games? For those who haven’t, in them, a race known as Leviathans noticed that several worlds in the galaxy had encountered a problem similar to this. They, believing themselves to be the smartest people in the room, built an AI themselves, and tasked it with stopping this phenomenon. That AI decided the best solution was to harvest those species before their AI could destroy them, and constructed massive automata to do so.Those automata became known as “Reapers,” the primary antagonists of the series, and the AI sent them after the Leviathans first.
“I fear no predator. I am the mightiest prey.”