It has both civil and military applications.
Very, very carefully.
In civilian applications, this is called autoindustrialism, and is the standard answer to how you pull an industrial base out of your hat. They ship the seeds for this with every new colony and outpost.
They generally aren’t true von Neumann machines, though, because while clanking replicators are a neat trick, they aren’t the most efficient way to do things. Rather than setting your robots to build new robots out of a pile of ore and sand, it’s much more effective to have them build smelters and fabs and robot factories, which then in turn serve as an assembly line to build the new robots (and anything else you want). The whole thing can be conceptualized as a von Neumann system, of course, but no individual machine is.
Under, of course, very careful supervision to prevent mutation and runaway. People aren’t concerned about them turning into paperclip maximizers, to be clear; they’re not built smart enough for that. But Cogli, the False Ecumenopolis, is right there as a demonstration of what happens when your autoindustrialism succumbs to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Problem.
(Have I told y’all about Cogli yet? I’ll try and write a “Places To Go” about it soon.)
Now, the military version…
Limited replication/fabrication systems are one thing. Nuclear War In A Can, Brigade In A Bottle, Janissary In A Drum, all popular products for very good reasons. Bio/nanoweapons are permissible, if you’ve built them with all the required safeguards and a few more besides in the name of good sense.
But unlimited military replicators? The Empire barely gets away with the swarm fleets for ADHAÏC CALYPSE and ADHAÏC PARASOL, and that’s only because they’re under the Transcend’s direct control, never actually used en masse with field replication, and their owners have a multi-millennial reputation for being incredibly consistent and responsible with this sort of thing.
But uncontrolled self-replicating military assets are a big feature of the Ley Accords’s Not Even Once list because screwing up your control software in this respect, or failing to protect adequately against mutational oopsies, tends to lead to rogue assets which turn with frightening speed into hegemonizing swarms leaving blights, gigadeaths, and sterilized planets in their wake.
If the galaxy is real lucky, the aftermath of such an event is some very angry people glassing large swaths of your homeworld to both remind you not to, and deprive you of any ability to, do anything that stupid ever again.
If it’s not, you get to go down in the history books of the fleeing survivors, for as long as there are fleeing survivors, as the creator of the Infinite Warcrime Engine. And that’s not a legacy anyone wants.
(Which is not to say there aren’t a few rogue states and groups who aren’t interested in the technology anyway, which is almost certainly beyond their capacity, but is in any case Fifth Directorate territory.)
The risk of mutation and runaway, incidentally, is why no-one’s using von Neumann probes.
Once you send them out into the far reaches of the galaxy, they’re beyond any control or correction you can exert, and the probability that your probes, however benign, even simple no-touch observers, will accidentally turn into something not unakin to malignant space cancer over time, space, and population trending ever upwards approaches 1. No-one’s touching that one.
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Oh, don’t the Associate Worlds use the von Neumann probes? Very sensible of them. In that case, how they colonize new worlds? I highly doubt they would be so primitive as to depend on means such as generation ships.
In the Eldraeverse, planetary colonization seems to be the mainstream (including asteroid colonization). Does this have to do with the fact that they do not utilize von Neumann machines to dismantle rocky and gas planets for building space habitats?
Cogli looks very interesting. What is the estimated likelihood of cases like Cogli, or even more seriously, von Neumann machines undergoing mutation into a hegemonizing swarm?
Lastly, what is difference between ADHAĂŹC CALYPSE and ADHAĂŹC PARASOL?
Do they use information-form crew on an STL starship, with or without von Neumann engineering plant as cargo?
If not, they should. Or maybe after fittlers…
Any generation ships would have been Thirteen Colonies era, several millennia back. (I don’t know if any of them actually were generation ships, or if they were all popsicle freighters.)
As for probes, only @avatar knows, but I point out in passing what amazing resolution imagery is possible with baselines measured in light-years.
I’m guessing the difference between PARASOL and CALYPSE maps to “known fool oopsied Big Time” vs “Outside Context Problem, please evacuate known space in an orderly manner.”