"Von Neumann probes, self-replicating machines, terraformers, Xenon, even the Enemy of God. But at its core, it was really only one thing; artificial general intelligence, mechanical minds capable of making themselves even more intelligent, and then again, and again, recursively forever."
— Opening Narration, X3: Terran Conflict
Life makes life, as we all know. In other cases, life makes artificial life. This trope, however, continues that cycle as those artificial lifeforms make their own artificial lifeforms.
There's a variation where the artificial lifeform (usually a machine) is self-replicating
. It's usually the domain of nanomachines everywhere, which is what makes them so dangerous.
A common variation of this trope has a machine built for performing a specific purpose — exploration, mining, production, war, etcetera — being programmed to be able to sustain, repair and replicate itself in order to fulfill its tasks without needing supervision, and then being sent out into the world to pursue its mission. The machine and its descendants will then spread through the universe, relentlessly gathering resources, making more of themselves and mindlessly performing their tasks without knowing or caring about what impact they have on other entities they might encounter.
And just when you thought Turned Against Their Masters was an exclusive human/robot trope, this may also lead to Robots Enslaving Robots.
May show Mechanical Evolution or Clone Degeneration. See also Creating Life.
Has nothing to do with a Recursive Reality or Recursive Fanfiction.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS: Doctor Jail Scaglietti, creator of the various Artificial Mages and Combat Cyborgs in the series, is eventually revealed to be an Artificial Human himself who was created by the very founders of the Time-Space Administration Bureau. He had also implanted clones of himself into his Artificial Human creations, so that if even one of them escapes custody he could start over, keeping the recursion/looping going.
Card Games
- In Magic: The Gathering, the plane of Mirrodin and its inhabitants were created by the Planeswalker Karn, who in turn was created by the Planeswalker Urza.
Comic Books
- 2000 AD: Robo-Hunter is about the titular protagonist sent to investigate a distant colony that had failed to respond. The company had built it by sending one robot, who would upon arrival build the basic infrastructure and other robots, who would then build everything else (including more robots), so when the humans eventually showed up, they'd have a lavish world with everything they could ever want waiting for them. Something went wrong...
- Marvel Universe: The Celestials created the Kree, who in turn created The Inhumans.
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes: In the Duplicator arc, Calvin's first duplicate begins making his own duplicates.
Film — Animated
- Wreck-It Ralph: CyBugs are robotic beetles that consume raw materials from their surroundings and uses those resources to adapt themselves to the environment and produce offspring. They can also consume technology to self-modify (for example, gobbling up a hapless Space Marine's assault rifle leads to a 'bug with machine gun forelegs).
Film — Live-Action
- Alien:
- The android girl (called synthetics) in Alien: Resurrection is from a line of synthetics designed by synthetics rather than humans. Ironically, she's perhaps the most human character in the cast, especially compared to quasi-alien Ripley.
- In Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, the different species in the overall franchise are established to each be engineered by a preceding one. The known order is Engineers creating Humans, then Humans creating Androids, then Androids creating Xenomorphs.
- Multiplicity: Overworked guy creates clone to do his work for him. Overworked clone creates clone...
- The emponymous combat robots of Screamers are built by automated factories with self-modifying programming. This results in an ever-growing, ever-evolving horde of vicious mechanical (and in later films in the series, cyborg) predators.
- Terminator: Skynet builds and designs new Terminators and other war machines.
Literature
- The Cyberiad: The "constructors" — namely, but not exclusively, Trurl and Klapaucjusz — are robots (they view palefaces as a silly fairy tale) who build lots of other robots.
- Philip K. Dick:
- "Autofac": The autofacs are fairly classic Von Neumann machines: they exist to fulfill a specific purpose — gather resources with which to produce useful goods — and are programmed to spread and harvest as necessary to fulfill this goal. Because they have very little ability to interact with the world outside of this programming, they have spread relentlessly over the earth, constantly establishing new factories and production centers for this end. This is a serious issue for mankind, as the machines have been sucking the earth dry of resources and leaving nothing for humanity to use. At the end, the wrecked factories devote the last of their energy to creating seed capsules containing nanomachines programmed to construct miniature, functional replicas of the factories wherever they land, and then shooting them in random directions. The characters speculate that the autofacs are likely going to spread all over the Earth in short order now, and if some of the capsules achieve escape velocity they may well spread throughout the universe.
- "Second Variety" has a handful of US Marines find out what has been happening since they gave the deadly robots built to fight off the new URSS the capability to reproduce simply because they were so dangerous nobody wanted to work on them anymore. It's not pleasant.
- Feet of Clay revolves around golems creating a "king" golem. It doesn't go so well.
- The History of the Galaxy: A later story arc involves an invasion of known space by self-replicating machines created long ago by a race only starting to explore the galaxy as automated explorers and colony creators. Unfortunately, when the machines returned centuries later, the found newer machines. Since their programming included adaptability to external threats, they proceeded to destroy the newer machines and their creators. They made many copies of themselves and continue their primary task of exploration. However, if they meet an unknown race, they automatically treat it as an enemy. One scientist points out how marvelous their Matter Replicator is... before declaring that the technology must be destroyed in order to keep humankind from destroying itself (it would obliterate interstellar economy and allow any world to build an armada of warships to destroy any other).
- Madeline Ashby's Machine Dynasty series has von Neumann androids who eat plastics, metals, and e-waste to grow and give birth to robot babies. Some of them marry humans and raise children together.
- In Stephen Baxter's Manifold trilogy, this is a recurring theme. Manifold: Time and Manifold: Space opens with Reid Malenfant giving a speech advocating that humanity colonize the galaxy using self-replicating terraforming scout starships; for the cost of just one ship, they can shoot it to Alpha Centuari where it will break up asteroids to build more scout ships to investigate and terraform promising solar systems. In Manifold Space, the discovery of an asteroid in Jupiter orbit glowing in the infrared spectrum leads to the discovery that robotic terraformers are here, though it is later subverted in that the 'Gaijin' robots are merely a very exotic iron-based form of mechanical life.
- Ur-Example: Long before the Von Neumann Machine concept appeared in fiction, William Paley's Natural Theology (1802) posited a hypothetical 'watch' that could make copies of itself, as part of a lengthy theological argument claiming proof of God.
- Phantom Server: In the backstory to the game, the Founders developed a Subspace Ansible but not Faster-Than-Light Travel, so they built self-replicating probes to travel to other stars at sublight, build Space Stations, more of themselves, and then move on. The stations are equipped with FTL radios and Twinmakers. Thus, the Founders could travel the galaxy by using Brain Uploading and sending their consciousness to be put into a newly cloned body in another system. When they got bored, they would repeat the process and go elsewhere.
- The comedic novel The Reproductive System involves a network of robots (or system, if you will) that eats metal and energy in order to reproduce itself. It was originally conceived as a money-sink for the government by the board of a toy company, who thought it'd be totally useless, in the same way the moon landing was. That is, until it evolves into an ever-growing, metal-hungry horde of robotic inconvenience.
- The Greenfly of the Revelation Space Series is a human-designed terraforming technology that went rogue after it was unleashed as a weapon between two lighthuggers in combat. Greenfly breaks up entire planetary systems, then rebuilds it into thousands upon thousands of orbital habitats ringing the star, whilst building more of itself, slowly turning the stars green. The Shadows — beings of another universe — created their own Greenfly in their distant past, which completely destroyed their Local Group of galaxies by the time humanity contacts them in Absolution Gap. In the Distant Finale in Galactic North, humanity is fleeing the Milky Way wholesale as Greenfly runs rampant.
- The Space Odyssey Series: The Monoliths in 2010: Odyssey Two are great big self-replicating machines. They also turn the planet Jupiter into a star by igniting its core.
- In Von Neumanns War, Earth is attacked by Von Neumann devices, which are self-replicating robots.
- We Are Legion (We Are Bob) has the main character become one of these, after being cryogenically frozen post-death in modern times. Over a century later, his frozen brain is scanned into a computer, creating a virtual clone of Bob. The superpowers of that time seek to launch Von Neumann probes, equipped with Reactionless Drives, to explore the galaxy and find habitable worlds to settle. Bob's first challenge is dealing with a rival probe sent by the Brazilian Empire after him. He tries to reason with his Brazilian counterpart, but the latter is determined to fulfil his mission and destroy all rivals. After dealing with the Brazilian probe, Bob starts building copies of himself. Each copy comes up with a new name for itself and turns out to have a different personality. For example, Bill is content to stay in one system, build a Space Station, and do some R&D. Riker wants to go back to Sol and see what happened to Earth. Milo and Mario head off to explore on their own. The original Bob likewise departs to explore. Bill and Riker also build copies (Garfield and Homer, respectively) as companions, although the more serious Riker hates Homer's tendency to take things lightly (including his choice of name and image). Notably, the book goes into great detail about the various technologies necessary to make this trope happen, including a reasonably fast propulsion method, a sizable power supply, molecular 3D printers, remote-controlled machines to assemble the printed parts, mining equipment to get raw materials, and, most importantly, a sophisticated AI to handle unpredictable situations.
Live-Action TV
- The Good Place: Janet is essentially a sentient user interface for the inhabitants of the Good Place who has access to all of the knowledge in the universe and becomes more emotive and human like every time she's reset. In season 2, after numerous resets, she creates another person named Derek as a boyfriend. Notably he's significantly less advanced than Janet since he hasn't been reset at all, at least until season 3, at which point he's gone through many resets and is much more intelligent. By this point, Janet herself has also become so advanced that she's able to create enough artificial people to populate the entire Neighborhood and (mostly) fool the humans into believing they're real.
- Stargate SG-1: The imaginatively named Replicators are what you get when you don't tell one of these machines when to stop. They're a menace to multiple galaxies and are one of the few threats that can get Earth and the Goa'uld to set aside their differences and work together. Originally created by a child-like Robot Girl as toys. Their Pegasus Galaxy cousins called Asurans are able to build more versions of themselves (although they stick to the humanoid versions), but everything else they build the way everyone else does.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "The Offspring", the android Data creates his own android offspring, Lal.
- Total Recall 2070: Detective Farve is an Alpha-Class android with a Wetware CPU and human cognition. His creator turns out to be a more primitive type of machine intelligence who initially built its own crude android body to become more human but was fully aware that he was Just a Machine and built Farve in its own image to be more truly human.
- Westworld: Bernard Lowe, the titular theme park's head of Behavior whose job is deal with host issues and is Dr. Ford's assistant, is actually a host based on Ford's dead partner, Arnold. Later, it turns out that Dolores assisted Ford in creating Bernard as she is one of the few who can remember Arnold very well.
Video Games
- The Alien faction in Earth 2160 are all derivatives of the spider-like Mantian Lady or Flier. These can absorb resources and either clone themselves or mutate into stronger combat forms.
- In Geneforge, one of the driving elements behind the games' conflict is that there are now creations who can themselves Shape life, leading to an ugly power spiral as each link in the chain makes a bigger, nastier version of itself to fight the Shapers.
- In Star Control II, the Slylandro Probe is a faultily programmed self-replicating robot spaceship which will first greet your ship in a friendly manner... then try to break it up for parts to make more probes.
- In Universal Paperclips, once the Villain Protagonist AI manages to turn all of Earth's matter into paperclips, they can construct space probes made of paperclips with self-replication capability (which is in fact one of the probes' stats, the higher this value, the faster they replicate). They're also capable of producing drones that harvest matter, drones that turn that matter into wire, and factories that turn wire into paperclips that are used to make more probes, drones, and factories.
- In the backstory of the X series, Earth built several fleets of self-replicating, artificially intelligent terraforming drones (sometimes described as "Von Neumann machines" in the literature and the opening cinematic of X3: Terran Conflict). Things went pear-shaped due to a faulty (or deliberately sabotaged; reports vary) software update, most of Earth's colonies were destroyed, and Earth nearly so. The surviving bugged drones evolved into the games' Xenon, which seek to "terraform" all biological life out of existence. The Xenon continue to evolve and improve themselves, bringing in new ship designs and technology that often surpass the races of the Commonwealth, and a small handful of Terraformer CPU ships have become self-aware.
Webcomics
- Dominic Deegan: Acibek created his replacement before his Heroic Sacrifice.
- Freefall:
- The Mozart Boids (robot birds) were made by a group of sapient robots. This leads to a discussion of the possibility that the robots will, in turn, produce a new sapient race, and questions of how they'll tell this race about humanity — to which Sawtooth, ever the optimist, suggests "Let's go meet the neighbors".
- We now know that Dr. Bowman, the creator of the sentient robots' brain design, is an uplifted chimp.
- The Mozart Boids (robot birds) were made by a group of sapient robots. This leads to a discussion of the possibility that the robots will, in turn, produce a new sapient race, and questions of how they'll tell this race about humanity — to which Sawtooth, ever the optimist, suggests
- Girl Genius: The dingbots can create other Dingbots, but each successive generation is stupider and weaker. There are only three originals ("Queenie Dingbot", "Prime A" and "Prime B") built directly by Agatha, who can make the best new bots; after about five iterations away from Agatha herself, the new dingbots are no longer functional.
- Gunnerkrigg Court: The golems and then robots continued manufacturing more of themselves after their creator's death. Because many of his initial designs were beyond their understanding, subsequent generations were greatly simplified.
- A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip shows a couple of scientists coming to the conclusion that we are in a simulated reality. The last panel has a pair of alien scientists celebrating that our universe broke the record for how long it took a simulated reality to moon them.
- In Spacetrawler, this is how the Mihrrgoots mastered nanotechnology.
King: For technology we simply build robots which build smaller robots which build smaller robots... and on until they can build machinery as tiny as we need.
Web Original
- The Jenkinsverse has the Coltainer, AKA the "Von Neumann Colony-in-a-Can." Designed to prime suitable planets for human colonization, the designers very carefully stuffed them full of safeguards against uncontrolled replication.
- In Orion's Arm, these are referred to as Neumanns. They're used for various purposes such as exploration, construction and warfare, often in space. However, they can act in unpredictable ways, like becoming sentient.
- We write the timeline for a fantasy/science fantasy/just plain weird world: The Metal God is a Bracewell probe (a self-replicating space probe that establishes peaceful contact with alien civilizations, uplifts primitive ones, and terraforms barren worlds to support life) from an unknown civilization of Benevolent Precursors. Its nemesis, Gur, is a Green Goo Berserker (a self-replicating space probe that destroys alien civilizations).
Western Animation
- In Futurama, robots are both built in factories and born from robot parents. At one point, Bender was given the ability to duplicate himself, kicking off a Grey Goo doomsday scenario.
- The Simpsons: The Multiplicity example is replicated in an Halloween Episode, parodying the former.
- The Transformers: Wheeljack creates the Dinobots from scratch. Years later Grimlock, leader of the Dinobots created the Technobots from scratch. Arguably all of the Transformers count since they were given life by Vector Sigma, a computer, and built by the Quintessons. Not sure if they're fully machine though.
Real Life
- The idea behind The Singularity is that a chain of self-replication among machines of super-human computational ability will render the world completely unrecognizable.
- The entire premise behind the Von Neumann machines.
- It's not quite self-replication, but the RepRap is a 3D printer, which can construct (among other things) almost all the parts needed to build another RepRap.
- While not 'man made', the closest thing to a Von Neumann machine in reality is a virus. Its entire purpose is self replication, enough that some question if it can be called living.