For Determined Exterminators, you pretty much have to do everything yourself so I go with : Power Drills, Superconductive, Bulky ( You have to build robots everywhere anyway, by the time you want to do mass migration the cost is trivial ) and Uncanny ( everyone hates you anyway, what are they going to do ? ;p ). That leaves you 1 point and 1 pick, so when you get robo modding you can add Enhanced Memory, convert your existing pop to get the leader benefit, then subspec a science race and give them logic engines.
For Driven Assimilators, it's more interesting, because you get to design two races, the machines and the cyborgs - I usually make the machines leaders/scientists so go with Logic Engines, Bulky and Custom Made ( doesn't slow you much at the start because you are using these guys only in labs, and you will run out of minerals faster than you can build them anyway ), using the first robo-mod for Enhanced Memory for those sweet high level immortal leaders.
For the cyborgs I go strong, industrious, decadent and solitary ( these two are basically free picks, cyborgs are mind controlled so ignore happiness ), and pick up the first gene mod to give them Thrifty. If they tweak the AI to be more aggressive you may want to go Thrifty first and pick up Industrious instead, but as it stands you can ignore early game energy issues by immediately scrapping your fleet, shipyard and service docks and replacing them with resource reprocessors. ( You'll probably want some ships by 2210 when pirates show up, although often you can get them for free from anomaly events anyway, and if the pirates spawn in a convenient location you can laugh at them as they get crushed by your starbase ).
You put robots in science labs and unity buildings, and have the cyborgs take over all the mining and energy production. When you pick up the neural amplifier from the Synchronicity traditions your economy basically kicks into unstoppable high gear, as your cyborgs will be producing insane outputs.
