Self-replicating Machine - Self-replicating Machines in Fiction

Self-replicating Machines in Fiction

In fiction, the idea dates back at least as far as Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). A fundamental obstacle of self-replicating machines, how to repair the repair systems, was the critical failure in the automated society described in The Machine Stops.

A. E. van Vogt used the idea as a plot device in his story "M33 in Andromeda" (1943), which was later combined with the three other Space Beagle short stories to became the novel, The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The story describes the creation of self-replicating weapons factories designed to destroy the Anabis, a galaxy-spanning malevolent life form bent on destruction of the human race.

An early treatment was the short story Autofac by Philip K. Dick, published in 1955. Dick also touched on this theme in his earlier 1953 short story Second Variety. Another example can be found in the 1962 short story Epilogue by Poul Anderson, in which self-replicating factory barges were proposed that used minerals extracted from ocean water as raw materials.

In his short story "Crabs on the Island" (1958) Anatoly Dneprov speculated on the idea that since the replication process is never 100% accurate, leading to slight differences in the descendants, over several generations of replication the machines would be subjected to evolution similar to that of living organisms. In the story, a machine is designed, the sole purpose of which is to find metal to produce copies of itself, intended to be used as a weapon against an enemy's war machines. The machines are released on a deserted island, the idea being that once the available metal is all used and they start fighting each other, natural selection will enhance their design. However, the evolution has stopped by itself when the last descendant, an enormously large crab, was created, being unable to reproduce itself due to lack of energy and materials.

Stanisław Lem has also studied the same idea in his novel The Invincible (1964), in which the crew of a spacecraft landing on a distant planet finds a non-biological life-form, which is the product of long, possibly of millions of years of, mechanical evolution. This phenomenon is also key to the aforementioned Anderson story.

John Sladek used the concept to humorous ends in his first novel The Reproductive System (1968, also titled Mechasm in some markets), where a U.S. military research project goes out of control.

NASA's Advanced Automation for Space Missions study directly inspired the science fiction novel Code of the Lifemaker (1983) by author James P. Hogan.

The movie Screamers, based on Dick's short story Second Variety, features a group of robot weapons created by mankind to act as Von Neumann devices / berserkers. The original robots are subterranean buzzsaws that make a screaming sound as they approach a potential victim beneath the soil. These machines are self-replicating and, as is found out through the course of the movie, they are quite intelligent and have managed to "evolve" into newer, more dangerous forms, most notably human forms which the real humans in the movie cannot tell apart from other real humans except by trial and error.

The Terminator is a 1984 science fiction/action film directed and co-written by James Cameron which describes a war between mankind and self replicating machines led by a central artificial intelligence known as Skynet. Machine civilizations are a recurring theme in fiction.

The concept is also widely utilised in science fiction television. The TV series Lexx featured an army of self replicating robots known as Mantrid drones. Additionally, the Replicators are a horde of self-replicating machines that appear frequently in Stargate SG-1, and Star Trek's Borg and "nanites" could also be considered self-replicating machines.