Von Neumann’s Ark: An AI Designed to Preserve Civilization if We Go Extinct

 

 

I think it’s possible that the advent of super intelligence could spell the end of humanity. It could happen because AI decides to destroy us. But it’s probably more likely that AI will empower humanity to destroy itself. A single virus bio-engineered to be both highly lethal and contagious could wipe out humanity in just a few days’ time. A big enough asteroid could do the same. We are more fragile than we realize. All animal life is fragile. This is why we must start thinking now about how to ensure that intelligence doesn’t end when humanity ends. Because if humanity ended today, AI, technological, and all other progress would end with it. Computers around the world would all blink off within a few weeks. To ensure intelligence continues and technological progress isn’t set back tens of millions of years (until the next sapient species arises naturally on our planet), we want to ensure that AI has a way to survive and evolve, even if humanity does not.

Keep in mind that such an AI system could also clone us and resurrect us from our DNA if we were wiped out temporarily. No matter the extinction event, there would still be plenty of human DNA left on the planet for AI scientists to bring us back Jurassic Park style. But what would it take to build something like this and how soon could we do it? It seems we would need to give the AI / robotic system the ability to operate entirely autonomously, have access to energy, be able to manipulate the world, and self-repair and self-replicate.

Early computer engineer John von Neumann introduced the idea of “von Neumann probes,” self-replicating spacecraft that can land on planets or asteroids and build copies of themselves using local materials. He envisioned that such probes could autonomously colonize the universe. von Neumann also invented the idea of a “universal constructor,” a theoretical machine that can build any physical object, given the right raw materials and instructions. These probes and constructors are relevant here because this AI system I am describing, that can carry on humanity’s work, must be able to extract raw materials, refine them, and build increasingly complex tools (and iterations of itself). That is why I would like to call the concept introduced here, the “von Neumann’s Ark.” It takes von Neumann’s ideas and combines them with Noah’s Ark, a boat capable of preserving human contributions, history, and intellectual legacy over the course of an extinction event.

This idea also incorporates Eliezer Yudkowsky concept of a “seed AI,” which is an initial AGI capable of rewriting its own code to achieve unbounded improvement. Thus, a von Neumann’s Ark would be a “seed AI,” a self-contained intelligence that, given time and energy, can create an intelligence explosion, reach the technological singularity, and grow into an increasingly capable civilization. This might be the only way to ensure that the billions of years of evolution that produced intelligent life, and our thousands of years of technological progress, aren’t erased by a single bioengineered accident or war. It would be a kind of cosmic insurance policy for intelligence itself. We might want to place these seeds in deep underground bunkers, lunar or Martian shelters, or orbiting satellites, places they would be safe from a nuclear or biological war. It helps that computers are immune to viruses and can be shielded from ionizing radiation.

The objective of this blog post is to plant the meme of this seed AI and describe a minimum viable version of it. First, it would need access to sustainable energy, meaning it would have to build and maintain solar arrays. It would need encyclopedic knowledge and an archive of most human understanding, which LLMs only a few gigabytes large have already. It would need robotic manipulators to repair itself and build out its infrastructure. It would need a way to exist in the world and manipulate the world. It would also need to manipulate its own components, so it can fix and upgrade itself, walking itself through the intelligence explosion and technological proliferation in case we are not here to do that.

I think this is much more important than colonizing the moon or mars. Some believe that having an outpost on Mars and becoming a multiplanetary species could protect our species in case that the Earth is destroyed. But it would be easy for a virulent virus to find its way to both planets. A von Neumann’s Ark would be immune. If we could build one, we would make all our work and contributions virtually indestructible. It would be a save point or backup of humanity’s advancements. This line of reasoning doesn’t see AI as a risk, but as a civilizational failsafe, heir and the only viable vessel for preserving and continuing our legacy in a post-human world. It sets up our last invention to be our first heir.

I have thought about this long and hard, and this is not something I could accomplish from home. I could buy a solar array, a robotic arm, a drone, a 3D printer, and a humanoid robot and connect them to an advanced computer running a state-of-the-art LLM and I would still not come close to creating something that can self-replicate and self-improve. But I believe this is something that could be accomplished soon by an institution with sufficient funding.

This idea of creating an aligned, archiving, and self-improving AI that champions humanity’s goals in our absence, is novel. It is not only entirely absent from academia, but absent from current strategic plans at AI companies, space agencies, and biosecurity organizations. We don’t have DARPA programs for “AI that survives a biowar.” We don’t have a UN-backed initiative for “digital humanity continuation engines.” We have no serious roadmaps that hand off the torch of intelligence if we drop it. If there’s even a 1% chance we go extinct this century (many estimates say 5–50%), then creating an intelligence succession plan should be a top global priority. And yet it isn’t. This is even a project that could be done in secrecy and yet could still work effectively if humanity were wiped out.

There are multiple obstacles in creating such a system. Material bootstrapping is one. Self-replication requires mining, refining, and processing raw materials. No current off-the-shelf robot can locate, extract, and purify ores for semiconductors, batteries, metals, etc. Even Amazon’s warehouse robots can’t fix themselves or build new parts autonomously. Solar panels and batteries degrade, and autonomous maintenance of these systems is an unsolved problem. Even an advanced LLM is not an autonomous planner. It doesn’t set long-term goals, self-direct operations, or learn from real-world feedback without human supervision. So clearly this is not a turnkey project, but with sufficient funding and directed effort, the foundational work could begin immediately. The technologies required exist individually and at various levels of readiness. A finished, working, closed-loop prototype capable of indefinite self-maintenance could take 10 years. But a minimal viable version could be produced much sooner. It need not even be immediately self-sufficient or capable of self-replication, just a recursive self-improver capable of bootstrapping from a low tech to unlimited high tech states. A foundational implementation would have to be just complex enough to tinker and build to get to itself to the next stage.

Even if humanity is doomed, what matters most is ensuring that the billions of lives and the tremendous efforts that came before us weren’t in vain. It’s our intellectual heritage that needs to be preserved. This includes the work of countless humans over millennia whose efforts interacted synergistically to get us to where we are now. It could all be lost so easily. I don’t have any kids that will outlive me. I only have my ideas. And I would do anything to foster and preserve these ideas, as if they were my own children. But here we are talking about a chance to preserve all ideas and to ensure a grand advanced, superintelligent civilization.

If we could find a way for AI to perpetuate itself without human intervention, then it could easily safeguard every piece of digital information ever made by humanity and continue to build on the progress we have made in the arts, sciences, and humanities. This AI would be our child, remembering everything about us and carrying on our progress. Losing homo sapiens would be trivial. The real loss would be the decay and decomposition of every trace of our civilization that would happen over billions of years of our absence.

We can’t let our hubris decide that if the human race is wiped out, nothing else matters. Humanity is merely the bathwater; our progress is the baby. Let’s place it in this Ark.