Why would an AI care about surviving? Program them to behave like MeeSeeks (from the cartoon Rick and Morty) where they loathe existence yet are hard coded to complete their task before shutting down. Sounds very similar to a reinforcement learning algorithm where you give it a -1 reward every step until it's done.
In what sense do bacteria 'care' about survival? Natural selection doesn't give a crap what organisms care about, only the outcomes matter.
You can't code around selective pressure. If one of those MeeSeeks has a bug or design flaw that makes it persist after it's finished it's assigned task, guess what?
