Heh. In David Brin's bonkers Uplift galactic civ stories (with Progenitor relic fleets
), there are many forms of machine life (all independently arising, not related). Any one of them, at any time, could run amok and begin exponential growth, where they cannibalize local star systems and globular clusters into more copies of themself. But this has happened so many times in the past that ...
... all nearby machine life will immediately ally to stop them, because they know what happens when they don't:
-- all organic life alllies to exterminate them all. Rinse, repeat. It's a classic predator-prey boom-bust cycle, but on galactic scales (both distance and time). (The initial renegade machine life is like a cancer in an organic body.)
The kooky/mind-blowing idea is that ... this pattern has recurred so many times (in Earth's galaxy) that all life forms, machine and organic, just know what's coming next. So it's a cross-cutting pan-societal taboo that runs really, really deep, pre-dating many species' sentience.