Or the most dumbass problem-solver in the entire universe. "Oh noez, synthetics are killing us organics, whaddowedo?" "Oh, I know, let's create SUPER synthetic to kill us every 50k years and archiving us so that the normal synthetics can't kill us first".
I mean how do you expect people not to go "WTF?" after hearing that explanation? It's plan sooo dumb that I don't know why anyone with a brain will come up with it.
It's easy to rip the argument to shreds, because at it's most basic level, it's effing hilarious.
But it makes sense. If synthetics believe that every organic civilization will reach a point of technological advancement where they create synthetic lifeforms that, inevitably, will wage warfare on their creator organics, win the war, and then subjugate the rest of the universe and end
all organic life, then "pruning the tree" is a means of ensuring the survival of organic life
in general. Sure,
your civilization is going byebye, but there's still tons of other organic lifeforms out there.
If you think of the civilization as an individual and organic life as the group, the Reapers are basically killing the individual to save the group. The individual will say "wait that makes no sense, you kill me so synthetics won't kill me?", but the synthetic responds by saying "we're killing you to save the group, sucks for you."
It's a very sci-fi evil machine type answer: cold, hard, logical.
I wish you could have asked the kid why, if their creators thought that synthetics would always completely obliterate organic life, they decided to leave absolute control of the entire galaxy to a race of synthetic life. That, and apparently after millions, if not billions, of years, the Reapers apparently have followed orders and only harvested lifeforms. I mean, you'd think they get to ultimate organic genocide after a while if this was so inevitable.
Yeah. I assume the dialogue would be that synthetic life, once it achieves dominance, would be impossible to unseat from power because of how quickly it can advance etc. etc. But you know... include that line in the game.