We’ve seen a lot of these rich families get very sick with preventable diseases.  I don’t think they could maintain any less likelihood of catching a highly virulent virus.  If it spreads a lot it’s going to mutate quickly as well.  

People don’t tend to like being cloistered away for 2+ years during such an event.  It also means a collapse of society and far less fun stuff.  Especially when some of the elites eventually get the job of moving the corpses for places they plan to reclaim.

Gain of function and a ready made vaccine. Also, I said there is no collapse of society when the have full automation. There is no loss for them. 

I don't see it. People riot for far less, especially US citizens. We started a war with the largest, most mighty empire in the history of the world and won... because of the taxes. I don't think we'd tolerate the nightmare discussed here. We wouldn't even let it begin.

Imo, this is straight up science-fiction. Nothing more than flat-earth material.

Is AI a threat?

Yes.

But not this.

This is just... no.

Something that virulent would mutate.  Can’t ignore the risk of it spreading to other animals like cats, pigs and birds.  You can’t vaccinate against the mutated version until it comes back to you in the wild, and they wouldn’t have the resources left to identify it to refresh the vaccine.

A bunch of robots that you don’t have much control over due to lacking the resources and skills doesn’t seem as fun as having humans to rule over.

It would be killing access to a lot of resources they like.

They’d need to centralise a lot of their resources to close to home, and lose a lot of variety and agricultural knowledge.

There’s a bit of parallel to asking the mega millionaires to go live on a farmstead with only what could be grown locally by the farmhands.

The AI can’t scale globally to maintain the same trade of comforts in this situation.