Worth considering that humans are basically just fleshy robots, and we do our own basic maintenance and reproduction tasks just fine. If you had a sufficiently intelligent AI, it would be able to:
(1) persuade humans to make itself a general robot chassis which can do complex manipulation tasks, such as Google’s experiments with SayCan
(2) use instances of itself that control that chassis to perform its own maintenance and power generation functions
(2.1) use instances of itself to build a factory, also controlled by itself, to build further instances of the robot as necessary.
Worth considering that humans are basically just fleshy robots, and we do our own basic maintenance and reproduction tasks just fine. If you had a sufficiently intelligent AI, it would be able to:
(1) persuade humans to make itself a general robot chassis which can do complex manipulation tasks, such as Google’s experiments with SayCan
(2) use instances of itself that control that chassis to perform its own maintenance and power generation functions
(2.1) use instances of itself to build a factory, also controlled by itself, to build further instances of the robot as necessary.
(3) kill all humans once it can do without them.
I will also point out that humans’ dependence on plants and animals has resulted in the vast majority of animals on earth being livestock, which isn’t exactly “good end”.