> The robot is limited by its gears.

Wait till they hook up the robots to other robots including 3D printers.

At which point does self-assembly and 3d printing overlap?

Is there some minimal viable size for a 3d printer to be shrunk down to, aka, cellular level?

Is there diminishing returns or does one eventually just go to nanites for this?

> Is there some minimal viable size for a 3d printer to be shrunk down to, aka, cellular level?

Great, not only chemicals, bacteria/virus, nuclear radiation, drones with guns can kill us all very efficiently, bot soon nanobots can devour us alive.

In principle you can pick-and-place individual atoms with an electron microscope. But if you think macro-scale 3D printing is slow, you'll be flabbergasted by how much slower this is.

Also Bios have millions of years of pre-trained reservoir DNA to put into use as/when needed.

What is preventing robots to incorporate all that information in their own models?

Its all undocumented legacy code?

I'd say that usually holds us back more than anything else.

Pretty much 99.99% of crime is related to our evolutionary process, imo. The edge cases of mentally ill people etc are low, but otherwise racist/homophobic/theft crimes are all just tribalism/being afraid of the other/resource contention at the end of the day; society and its rules are just a patch on top of millennia of forming small groups and marching over to hit other neighbouring small groups with rocks.

Sentient life would be both impressive & scary in that it can theoretically optimise itself far, far beyond what we can. Then again it could go the other way too: aggressive nanobots that start disassembling humans getting into tribal-like wars with other groups of nanobots to fight over resources aka humans to melt down.