But I think that there are limitations on these kinds of techniques and we can see them with the changing economics of our most advanced technologies -- semiconductors. Improvements have slowed, capital investments have increased and cost per transistor have plateaued and are now starting to rise.
At the same time the way that we extract energy from our environment is not sustainable and is causing great imbalances in our atmosphere which are having cascading effects on the environment and this is all due to the fact that our energy systems are not closed loop.
If we're going to take manufacturing and industry as a whole to the next level just like the industrial revolution did we're going to need to take cues from biology. The next manufacturing revolution will be a merger of the ideas from the industrial revolution, the digital revolution and biological systems like the ones you describe above.
Self replicating systems that can heal, source their parts from the environment around them, and that can scale exponentially through processes akin to cellular division are inevitable.
They will allow us to offload the burden of mineral extraction and refining to the moon and asteroids, and will allow us to massively scale up the production of products on scales previously unimaginable and of goods full of elements like platinum or gold we consider obscenely expensive due to their relative rarity on Earth.