I bought some houseplants a bit back and it's been fascinating to see how quickly they grow. The vast majority of that new mass literally comes from thin air.
I laugh yellow~ when people dream of robotics.. when I see an annoying mosquito, I look at how thin all this is and yet it lives, flies, perceive the world quite a bit ...
To an extent I think the future will just be the same old past except we'll now understand nature a bit more. I hope so.
E.g. a compound eye with the angular resolution of your current eyes would be about the size of your head.
Edit: nope, even bigger:
>To see with a resolution comparable to our simple eyes, humans would require very large compound eyes, around 11 metres (36 ft) in radius.