So, in the show, episode 5, they talk about the arc of the covenant.
Shell Made of gold
2 feet by 4 feet
construction very specific
2 angel figures on top
Imagine an extraterrestrial race. to cross space is too cumbersome and dangerous for fleshies, so it's unlikely they'd try to do it in giant mother ships. what they would do is upload their consciousness to a machine.
There are references for the ancient gods on earth as FALLEN angels, why fallen, well because earth used to be ****ty and undeveloped, why would a good alien bother, so earth must've occupied a similar status to australia, a penal planet for Advanced Rogue AI-singularity entities.
So there's a race of super advanced AIs, they all have their own homeostatic boxes/containers, and perhaps spaceship type attachments that they traverse in.
But some AI pissed off all the other AIs, and they were sent to earth. This could've been primordial earth with NOTHING.
The AI container likely has its own power-source, and some basic method of agency.
Whatever force it could emit, could've been used to pattern the theorized biological fluid of primordial earth, postulated which formed on potentially crystals. crystals etched deliberately by this AI-Box
This AI probably did not have arms or legs, either just by design, or removed as punishment, it may have had an emmisive device or had some ability to resonate.
But as you know, all machines/ containers break down eventually.
That is why after creating life on the planet earth, and via the passage of time it eventually was not in perfect operation, then came meteors, etc. it must've been damaged.
The damage to its power core, a mini fusion engine of sorts, must've emitted radiation, which is consistent with the stories that people who looked into the arc became very sick, or blinded, or had boils on their skin. radiation poisoning. The segment in the show about how the Priests entrusted with interacting with the arc of the covenant, eventually became sickly, also made sense.
So we have a non-fully operational container which houses an AI-entity, which has potentially created life on earth, be it out of loneliness and/or boredom, and/or desire to take back to the cosmos and wage war against those who wronged him.
Now, this is not actually so straightforward for the AI, give away too much, and people won't help him, give away too little, and the humans are too dumb to figure out the next steps.
So it must guide humanity to a point where we have enough remote technology that it can directly wield it and construct and /or repair its component/ body.
That being the case, at this point, it is likely that it has already completed most of what it needs.
The other possibilities, his old AI buddies in space/ jailors, checks in on him once in a while, and drops meteors and the like to prevent him from getting off the planet/ becoming space worthy.
To beings of galactic scale, we're probably not so special, and not that different than ants, so killing us probably doesn't evoke in them a strong level of empathy.
Alot of the motivations would be unclear, it could just be perhaps a way of entertainment for them, possibly here's a barren rock, the new-born AI entity is dropped, it has to claw itself out and become spaceworthy/ born again. That's also possible.
We can't really understand motivations at that level.
HOWEVER, if we assume that they have technology but are still afflicted by an ultimate cognition barrier, they may have not gone beyond PLAY. because ultimately if you have NO wants and NO needs, the only thing left is the sand box, and that is PLAY, so PLAY can be understood as the ultimate barrier in terms of motivation, what else is there if AS A LIFEFORM, you can not die, you play, there's nothing else.
We hughmahns as a race may just be extraneous crop-ups resultant of the consequences of the super-intelligence born elsewhere, stuck on penal straya earth..
Other scenarios include this being an educational coming of age development for their newborn AIs. So to them the manipulation of humans despite some level of sentience is no different than our use of food animals/slavery.