The more complex the system, the more potentially undesirable states you have.
Undesirable states take work to remove.
Human efforts being imperfect, undesirable states appear spontaneously and accumulate over time, requiring further work.

Atmospheric pressure on Mars is 1% that of Earth. How're you going to get any lift?

Please get back to work.

Because as we all know the demand for programming is infinite....

Calling these things nanobots or microbots is misleading. They're little tubes propelled by hydrogen gas bubbles. No onboard or remote intellegence or control of any kind really. Micro-torpedoes maybe.

"I would recommend that we put the unit back in operation and let it fail."

the National Security Breach database has been breached. Please try again later.

TFA says the sample was removed from a display for safety concerns. According to this source, Pu 239 has a specific activity of .063 curies/g. For a 2.7ug sample, that's 0.175 uC. I don't get why anyone thought safety was an issue for such a tiny source.

Used to be a part of every Internet session... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Human effort is the only thing that requires compensation.

Careful there. Raw materials cost in proportion to their rarity and difficulty in digging them up. Service providers (Banks, ISPs, Telecoms) routinely charge inflated BS fees, which, if charged rationally, would amount to billionths of a cent.Government licensing fees, fines and taxes also have little relationship to reality outside of what the market will bear. In commerce, the relationship between real value and dollar cost is a matter of power politics (CEO vs worker wages).

In a competitive environment, those companies that don't adopt the latest tools to keep costs as low as possible for a given level of quality are eventually driven out of business. Even boutique manufacturers such as Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce have crap-tons of automation.

"Penny?" knock knock knock. "Penny?" knock knock knock. "Penny?"

Time to eat a fly...

Also: How do you keep a 30 kW laser, at any frequency, from blinding everybody in the general direction of the target?

Some of these things work in IR so scattered/reflected light might burn your head off but it won't blind anybody.

Here's a question: if self learning were possible to the extent we're talking about, why haven't we seen it yet?