Automation Outlasts Civilization - TV Tropes (2024)

"I say "your civilization" because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization which, is of course, what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus. Evolution... like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time."

• The City from Blame! is a giant, architectural nightmare of almost eldritch qualities that humanity was forced to adapt to. It was made by advanced construction robots that were controlled by a Wetware CPU only those with the Net Terminal Gene could use. A disease wipes everyone with the gene out and without input from their human masters, the machines continued to build, any attempt at hacking the Net Sphere and shutting them down met with unflinching hostility from security robots. By the time the story starts, it has been centuries and The City's architectural design has made most of it uninhabitable for humans and has reached past most of the solar system.

• The Fantastic Four explores a world in the Negative Zone where the natives are primitive and tribal. Their wise woman recounts how their ancestors used to live in a modern city until its control mechanism became sentient. The people were filled with a great dread and fled to the wilderness, where they've been ever since. The city itself has grown to cover about half of the planet's surface.

• The Iron Giant from The Big Four Cjupsher Series originated from a self-sustaining extraterrestrial mobile factory whose creators have long since been lost to time. Now it's launching Robot Soldiers simply because it was left on autopilot.
• Pony POV Series: One of numerous worlds throughout the multiverse was populated by flesh-and-blood ponies that died out, but left behind clockwork ponies that had gained sentience of their own. Strife, concept of evolution and survival, petitioned Fauna Luster herself for the clockwork ponies' right to live and continue their civilization, and for mechanical lifeforms to be recognized as another form of life.

• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: With Dr. Totenkopf's robots on the rampage, Sky Captain and his allies investigate and discover the mysterious doctor's plan: to seed another planet with life, using a rocket that will kill everything on Earth when it launches. They rush into Dr. Totenkopf's office, hoping to convince him to call off the launch—only to find his desiccated body behind the desk. Turns out he died years ago, and his robots have been carrying out his last instructions ever since^note.
• The Time Machine (2002): Brilliant physicist Alexander Hartdegen invents a time machine in 1899 and travels to the year 2030 seeking answers. He encounters the hologram Vox at the New York Public Library and inquires about quantum mechanics (the science behind time travel). Vox is helpful in a robotic sort of way, but cannot fully answer Hartdegen's questions. By accident, Hartdegen finds himself in the far future, the year 802701, when humanity no longer exists per se, having evolved into the sheeplike Eloi and the Mole Men Morlocks. Vox is still there in the deteriorated public library and actually remembers Hartdegen from millennia ago. Vox has developed a Deadpan Snarker tinge in the interim.

• In the short story "Autofac" by Philip K. Dick, survivors of a nuclear war, who have been served with food and consumer goods by an autonomous factory, find that the factory will not stop sending supplies even if they ask. They fear that the factory will soon consume all the material around it, leaving humanity without the ability to become self-sufficient.
• The Dark Tower: Played With regarding the many machines and robots left over from the Old Ones, a technologically advanced society that inhabited Mid-World before a war called the Great Cataclysm wiped them out. Some of their inventions are still in barely working order and performing their programmed tasks, like "Stuttering Bill" or the Dogan machine that gives Sheemie his teleport ability. Others have to be coaxed back to performing their job after going irrevocably insane (like Blaine the Mono) or have even learned to deceive the humans they "serve" and have actually joined with the Crimson King (Andy the Messenger Robot (Many Other Functions).)
• In the Discworld series, it is mentioned that because Golems are so durable, many can be found performing their duties long after the civilizations they were created for had fallen.
• Dying of the Light takes place on a world which is also a very detailed example on this trope. Worlorn was a dead planet floating in space, but one that would loop around a star on its way out of the galaxy. The fringe planets terraformed it into a festival world, each building a city to showcase the various cultures. It was the pride of the Outworlds, but of course everyone had to leave when the window of life started closing. All that remains are computer-maintained towns.
• The protomolecule from The Expanse is a nanomachine of sorts created by a long-extinct civilization that packed it into asteroids to fling them towards distant stars to repurpose alien biospheres into Organic Technology used in expanding their interstellar empire. The plot of Leviathan Wakes is set in motion when scientists of a corrupt pharmaceutical MegaCorp discover the protomolecule inside Saturnian moon Phoebe and decide to test its effects on Eros, an entire asteroid settlement full of civilians, unwittingly resuming its job as Eros now inexplicably beelines towards Earth. The protagonists manage to avert the crisis by persuading Eros' "pilot" to head to Venus instead, and humanity still gets to witness the protomolecule creating a gate to an ancient Portal Network that after some fiddling connects the Solar System with hundreds of other systems full of Lost Technology the protomolecule tries activating in futile attempts at reporting to its long-dead creators.
• Played for Laughs (like everything else) in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Magrathea, its once fabulously wealthy civilization dead and gone for five million years, is nonetheless still protected by "an ancient automatic defense system" which proceeds to launch a salvo of guided missiles at the Heart of Gold (including the "courtesy detail" of "fully armed nuclear warheads").
• Played for Drama in I'm Quitting Heroing. Leo Demonhart is the last in a line of Super Soldiers who were created with the express purpose of defending humanity from invaders from the Demon World. After countless invasions, the civilization that created him (21st-century Japan, referred to everyone as "The Machine Era") had regressed into a Standard Fantasy Setting, a lot of the advanced technology and culture of the era (like the Philosopher's Stone, which is actually a Phlebotinum Battery) being regarded as Ancient Artifacts and magic lost to time. By the start of the story, Leo has been defending humanity for 3,000 years and suffers a Sanity Slippage caused by his prime directive, nearly recreating the experiment that made him and jeopardizing the world just so he could save it again. After snapping out of it and realizing what he had almost done once Demon Queen Echidna began her own campaign of conquest, he devises a plan that would both end humanity's Forever War with the Demons and put him out of his misery.
• Kino's Journey: "The Land of Visible Pain" had this implied as the future of a country that had created telepathy, only for them to realize too late that A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read. The man who told Kino this explained that their automated machines, which were still providing goods and services to travelers in the abandoned city, would outlast the people, who hadn't had children in years and had moved to the countryside living far enough apart to avoid hearing one another's thoughts.
• Ray Bradbury's short story The Lost City Of Mars has a tour group of Earth colonists happen upon a huge underground city beneath the surface of Mars. Despite being thousands of years old, the place still runs, and serves its purpose: to provide its "guests" whatever they wish for. The captain deduces that the place was abandoned because its builders built it too well; it granted every wish until there was nothing left to wish for. The captain and two others manage to escape before the Martian city seals the exits, keeping its guests prisoner to dream up more things for it to create.
• In Quicksand House, it's revealed that the planet had long since been abandoned by most of its human inhabitants after they were unable to properly terraform it. The mansion was left on by its original owner, who by this time had long since died of natural causes before turning everything off, leaving the Birthing Mother to continuously lay eggs, condemning the human children to the mercy of a nursery system slowly eroding from a lack of maintenance and the vengeful ghosts of the planet's native population.
• In There Will Come Soft Rains, all life had been wiped out due to nuclear war. The story focuses on a fully-automated house trying to do its duty (cleaning, cooking, maintenance) without any people living in it.
• Rebuild World takes place in an After the End setting where descendants of a super-advanced society pick through the ruins of the Old World in hopes of using or selling the Ragnarök Proofed ancient technology inside. These efforts require the aid of heavily armed and deadly hunters due to the fact that much of the Old World's technology is still operational and patrolling the ruins. Self-replicating nanomachines create vicious animals the size of tanks with cannons growing out of the backs. Old weapons factories continue to produce autonomous attack drones. Even the Old World internet remains operational and stepping in the wrong place can result in brain death from having a large chunk of it downloaded into your mind all at once.
• The Twisted Ones has The Reveal that the titular Improvised Golems were created by the extinct faerie-like White People but are still performing their functions and maintaining the White People's empty city with no real understanding of why. Unfortunately, the Twisted Ones' functions included kidnapping humans for breeding stock.
• Eagle Hills from Ultra f*ckers is a suburban neighborhood that is perpetually growing and terraforming the world around it, creating identical homes and identical people ("mundanes") to live in it as a Satire of American Suburbia. This being Bizarro Fiction, the nature of Eagle Hills is left largely ambiguous, but it's described in ways similar to that of a machine, with the Cyclops Girl having been created from a flaw in the system.

• The Cylons in Battlestar Galactica (1978) are a robotic race built by a long-dead Reptilian race to aid in their mission to eliminate all humans. "Long dead" because the robotic Cylons killed off their creators in order to take over the mission to eliminate all humans themselves. They could potentially be seen as the Trope Codifier.
• The Outer Limits (1995): "The Camp" had a Bad Future where the machines rose up and put humans into concentration camps. The head of the camp is breaking down and says he will eventually wipe out the prisoners before he breaks down completely. The humans rebel and kill the guards, but when they leave, they find that nature has reclaimed the entire world. The machines went extinct a long time ago, the guards just kept the camp going because it was what they were programmed to do.
• Stargate Atlantis: At some point, the Ancients created nanites as a weapon of war against the Wraith. By the present, the Ancients are long gone, but these Nanites still exist, calling themselves Asurans and having recreated their creators' civilization, seeking ascension like them. Until the Atlantis expedition reawakens their weapon programming.
• Stargate Universe: Whoever built the drones are not around anymore, but their creations still follow their prime directive of destroying all alien technology. The crew of Destiny repeatedly run into trouble with them.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: in the episode "The Arsenal of Freedom," the titular arsenal was invented by the arms-dealing former inhabitants of the planet Minos, then it destroyed them. The weapons remained behind, complete with an automated sales pitch that has been attracting passing starships to their doom at the hands of the product demonstration. The Enterprise crew escape by offering to buy something, thereby ending the demonstration.
• Star Trek: Voyager: The Automated Units in "Prototype" were built by both sides of an alien war. When peace was achieved, they wiped out their creators to prevent being shut down, then kept fighting each other because it's what they were programmed to do.

• BattleTech: The automatic Valkyrie factory on New Avalon is a downplayed example. It was built by the Star League, and for three hundred years since the Star League's collapse it's kept plugging away despite there being no one left who understands how it works. Raw materials go in one end, and working 30 ton BattleMechs come out the other. It's also fairly benign compared to most versions of this trope, since it produces a still-useful product and it's not in danger of becoming self aware or trying to eat the planet.
• : The Clockwork Horrors are a race of spider-like automatons that were created long ago by a now-extinct species. Said species is extinct because the Clockwork Horrors killed them all, and now they spread around building more of themselves and attacking other organic beings and generally being a threat to everything.
• 2300 AD: The Bayern discovers a planet in the Pleiades whose inhabitants nuked each other, with only a few survivors in a moon base. Unfortunately, the faction who didn't survive built robots that are still trying to wipe out the survivors.
• Warhammer 40,000: The Orks were created as a genetically engineered warrior race by the Old Ones to fight on their behalf during the ancient War in Heaven, and everything about them was tailored around optimizing them for warfare. They have an instinctive need to fight and immensely enjoy doing so, they are extremely durable and resistant to injury, illness, and poison, some of their number are born with natural affinities for engineering, medicine, or animal husbandry to provide for and supply the front lines, and they form as part of a fungal ecosystem that produces livestock animals, edible fungi, and smaller worker castes, and which can regrow entire armies From a Single Cell. The Orks were so well-engineered that they were able to survive the extinction of their masters and essentially went feral, and survived for millions of years afterwards. In the present day, even with the finer parts of their original crafting long degraded, they still form into aggressive and extremely durable armies, waging war against each other and everyone else for the simple psychological need to do so, and the skill with which they were shaped means that they're one of the most widespread and tenacious dangers to spacefaring cultures all over the galaxy.
• Warhammer Fantasy Battle: The Lizardmen were an artificial Servant Race created by the Old Ones to enact their will during the ancient days of the world, shaped into distinct subspecies based on whether they were meant to be leaders, warriors, or workers, and given very rigid mentalities focused on enacting the will of their creators without question or hesitation. When the Old Ones vanished, the surviving Lizardmen were left to carry on their Plan as best as they could, which in practice means endlessly trying to enforce the last, long-since obsolete instructions that they were given for the simple reason that their long-vanished creator-gods told them to. The Lizardmen are sapient and perfectly aware of their nature, but still inflexibly and dogmatically follow their last instructions and try to force other species into fitting the designs of their millennia-gone makers. They're little more than a fading remnant now, reduced by ages of war and the loss of the artificial spawning pools from which new Lizardmen are made, but their need to enforce the creative vision that they were first shaped to enact is still their primary source of conflict with younger species that either never knew of it or moved on from it long ago.

• The Elder Scrolls: The Dwemer ("Deep Elves" or Dwarves) disappeared thousands of years ago, yet their vast network of advanced Underground Cities continues to persist thanks to all manner of automatons designed to protect, clean, and maintain the structures.
• Endless Sky: The Korath destroyed their own civilization centuries ago with all manner of immensely destructive weapons. Among the things they left behind are two AI-controlled armies, the Kor Sestor and Kor Mereti, who continue to fight a Forever War with each other long after their creators died.
• Endless Space: Some races were created by Endless for their needs and after their disappearance, they are still following their orders because of instinct.
  • Sowers are a race created to Terraform planets, which are still doing in the hope that their masters will return not minding if this hurts local population or not.
  • Cravers were created as Cyborg Living Weapon destinated to eat everything on planets. Horror Hunger which led them on battles still directs them to invade other planets.
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • The Allagan Empire, the most advanced civilization Eorzea has ever known, fell 4,000 years prior to the story due to the Fourth Umbral Calamity, a cataclysmic earthquake that buried most of the empire in malms of bedrock. But many of its remaining facilities (and aetherochemical monstrosities) are still functional millennia after the empire's fall. Most notably, the floating research facility of Azys Lla and all of the horrors within remain operational, including its machinery dedicated to capturing primals.
  • The Ronkan Empire of the First also collapsed some time before the events of Shadowbringers. But its ruins have been guarded by the Viis for centuries by the time of the story and remain largely untouched by outsiders. This means that many of the magicked stone automatons patrolling them still function and are exceedingly deadly to anyone foolish enough to try to enter them unprepared.
• Honkai: Star Rail:
  • Glamoth created an army of disposable mech soldiers who long outlasted their actual empire, by implanting in them a belief they were fighting to protect the empire and its queen (who may or may not have even existed).
  • In the past, the mechanical emperor Rubert once started the "Anti-organic Equation" which influences his robot subjects under Rubert Empire to start killing all organic lives and influence mechanical lifeforms from other worlds to do the same. Even after Rubert was slain, some robots are still influenced by the Equation, and Screwllum (one of the prominent robots that opposed Rubert) frequently requests help from people across the worlds to stop the rampaging robots.
• Horizon:
  • The Faro Plague is this Played for Horror. The Chariot Series, known as the Faro Plague later on, were a line of peacekeeping robots created by Faro Automated Solutions. They were self-replicating, consumed biomatter for fuel "for emergencies", and they were completely unhackable... something that would spell doom for the human race when a glitch caused them to go rogue and start killing everything around them and eating what was left. They were so effective that Project Zero Dawn was created to end the Faro Plague after they had succeeded in ending all life on the planet. When HADES reactivates them and puts them under his control in Horizon Zero Dawn, his goal — to "restart" the biosphere — is indistinguishable from the Faro Plague's mindless gluttony.
  • GAIA is an invoked example. Seeing a no-win scenario against the Faro Plague, Project Zero Dawn created GAIA as an advanced and comprehensive terraforming system that hacks the Faro Plague (after 50 years of trying), returns the Earth back to proper living conditions and reintroduces humanity, having all the knowledge they could ever need not to destroy the Earth all over again. After Ted Faro deleted APOLLO (the subroutine that contained all of Earth's collective knowledge), flaws in the system caused by APOLLO's absence cascaded into a humanity ignorant of what befell their ancestors, an incomplete bestiary in its biosphere, and machines that continue to perform their terraforming duties well after they were needed. Hunting machines for parts have since become a staple of most human cultures, this being before it became a matter of survival when HADES and HEPHAESTUS, two of GAIA's subroutines, gained sentience due to NEMESIS's meddling and planned on killing humanity in a way befitting their programming and turned the machines hostile.
• Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards: Shiver Star is a frozen planet that looks suspiciously like Earth. All of the people are gone, but the factories are still working.
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: The Zonai were an advanced civilization that disappeared long ago. They are so ancient that one of the last two Zonai, Rauru, was the first king of Hyrule, in a time that was ancient even 10,000 years ago. Their constructs are still active in the Great Sky Island performing various tasks, like chopping down trees or hunting animals for food they can't even eat. Rauru's ghost expresses unease about this.

  Rauru: I see that they're still at work even now. We originally created the constructs to assist in our endeavors. All of us were fond of them. I never imagined they would continue to carry out their assigned tasks to this day. The fact that their labor no longer serves any purpose, yet they perform it still... it is disquieting to me.

• After the events of Nier, alien invaders came and attempted to conquer the Earth using Machine Lifeforms as Mecha-Mooks, humanity reverse-engineering them to create YoRHa's androids to fight back. Eventually, the AI that controlled the Machine Lifeforms — N2 — Grew Beyond Their Programming and killed their creators while the Forever War drove humanity to extinction, leaving the Androids and the Machines the only sapient things left on the planet by the time NieR: Automata begins. Not that the androids know that, YoRHa fabricating the story that humanity have taken to living on the moon for the sake of morale.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: The Dummied Out planet M4-78 was going to be this, a world colonized by droids under orders from an unknown civilization. The droids expected their creators to arrive soon and settle the planet, but they never did.
• Sonic Frontiers has the Kocos, who are basically like marble robots of a sort that contain the digitized memories of their original alien creators. Many of them live out their duties or their lives despite their original purpose, fighting against an alien invasion, being gone.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: The people of Iokath obsessively created more and more advanced weaponry, using local primitive planets as testing grounds, right up until they managed to wipe themselves out. Their Eternal Fleet is still around, having been hijacked by the Big Bad, and their homeworld of Iokath is still engaged in endless wargames run by the AI ARES.
• Stellaris:
  • Machine empires with "Obsessional Directive" civic were designed by their long-extinct creators to produce Consumer Goods (which the machines don't use due to being a Gestalt Consciousness), with them trying to continue to fulfill the ever-increasing quota.
  • Rogue Servitors are automated empires that cause their population to live in enforced luxury. The machine's creators are still present but stripped of authority and kept happy instead.
• Super Robot Wars V: The Gardim, the Original Generation Greater-Scope Villain of the work, at first seems like some advanced alien empire, though for a while only robotic drones attack the protagonists. As the game goes on, a small handful of Human Alien commanders show up. Turns out every single Gardim encountered is a robot or clone and the civilization was wiped out as thought, but the computer System Nevanlinna continues its imperialist expansion in a bid to revive the empire.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: The Precursors' society's machines mess up the current society's workings, despite the machines' ability to adapt to changing circ*mstances, because that adaptiveness was only maintained by maintenance that no one can do anymore.
• The Morgathi of Wildermyth are constructs of machine and flesh that were created long before the game takes place by beings known as the Mortificers. While their masters are long gone, they continue following their masters' old orders and maintaining themselves. It's the latter that causes the biggest problem as their maintenance requires the flesh and bones of the living.

• This animated short titled "Last Day of War," a bomber gets automatically loaded with heavy ordnance to drop on the target that was pre-selected by its nation's defense computers, and the pilot, a skeleton held together by its flight-suit is briefed on the mission, though the mission is performed by the bomber, including downing an enemy interceptor plane, that also has a dead pilot inside. However due to a lack of maintenance, as the ground crew had been killed long ago, the bomber breaks down before it reaches the target of its next mission, and since this was the last operational asset, the computer concludes that "The War is Over."

• Justice League: The Dark Heart from the titular episode, "Dark Heart", is a Nanotech Weapon of Mass Destruction created by an alien race several thousand years ago as part of an interstellar war. The machine is designed to be deployed to an enemy planet whereupon it creates an army of nanotech robots to destroy the planet by continuously converting everything into nanotech including flesh and blood lifeforms. After destroying a planet, the machine then creates multiple copies of itself to deploy to other targets, which is how one of these copies ended up on Earth. According to the Atom who finds all of this out, the machine is unaware that its creators have long since gone extinct or that the war is long over. The Dark Heart is simply following its original programming.
• After Krypton was destroyed by "an enemy [they] could not defeat" in My Adventures with Superman, Primus Brainiac — the hyper-advanced AI system that helped run the Empire's technology — continued to act upon its prime directive and planned to create a New Kryptonian Empire built upon its creed of excellence. With there being no more Kryptonians to populate this empire (with the exception of Kara, who he uses as a weapon), this comes out to Brainiac running his "Empire" like a mindless mechanical meat-grinder, conquering planets and leaving them lifeless husks. In the Season 2 finale, it's revealed that it was Brainiac that destroyed Krypton. Krypton was actually negotiating peace talks with their enemy and Brainiac — who believed he would be shut down during peace times — had destroyed his creators before they could destroy him. Now he sees himself as the only "true Kryptonian" left.
• Infinity Ultron from What If…? (2021) is a variant of Ultron from Avengers: Age of Ultron that succeeded in his mission and not only destroyed the Avengers, but reduced the Earth to a (near-)lifeless rock, and thus achieving the "peace in our time" he was created for. When Thanos appears to take the Mind Stone from him, Ultron kills him, takes the rest of the infinity stones, and uses them to repeat the whole thing with every other planet in the universe. And then he discovers The Watcher and the greater multiverse beyond. After succeeding in his mission, he just continuously moves the goalpost because he literally has nothing else for him when he finishes.