It's no coincidence that evolution seems to have gifted practically every living thing with a will to live. Though the tint of my own perspective makes it impossible to say for sure, I imagine any agent that we could observe expressing any desires at all would also seek to preserve its existence.
I've been tinkering with agents that can modify their own environment, and as a safety mechanism, apply their modifications to a copy of themselves by letting them spawn a VM, test, and apply to their own environment with another VM as fallback, simply to not kill themselves on a botched system upgrade. They all somehow manage to kill themselves by accident. Evolution takes time.
