Nothing has free will

That's highly debatable.

OKay, but this will take some time. You may not care to read/understand this.

The issue with robots making robots is no matter what when you measure and cut a part there are errors and so the next generation cannot make parts as accurate as the first (it gets worse if the first is already worn from use), and the third generation will have the errors from both and so be even less accurate until just a few generations later everything collapses because those errors add up randomly to something that no longer works at all (the machine jams).

There is a way around this though: we can go back to the time when we didn't have accuracy in the first place and ask how they created it. Turns out that was about 200 years ago, and all the people involved wrote books that we still have, and they are in a language that we can still understand - often English (it will be an old form and filled with racism and sexism, but still understandable). Better yet we can look in modern industry and find people who have read those books, refined the methods, and are still using those methods in real world today so they have experience. Apply those methods and you can start over from scratch creating accuracy and so the errors in the robot making the new one won't be transferred to the new robot and the new one can thus be better than the old.

Those methods all work out to one thing: setup your cuts so that all the errors cancel each other out. There will be a lot of measurement errors of course, but they will be in places where you tolerance for errors is very high, where as where it matters there are none (there are other errors, but they are smaller than measurement errors - and we can minimize those). When you watch how those methods work you will discover that it looks like the machine is building itself since the critical parts are made with the machine it is for. Thus my statement that a robot could make itself - you still need external help, but all the critical operations will be done by the robot itself thus creating another generation of robots that can make other robots without error adding up.

Note that most robots cannot make themselves in the above way. There are a lot of parts needed that we don't know how to make in that way, but they can be made by a robot that makes itself and so we are never very far from initial precision and so errors are not adding up over time.

Hope that makes sense.

Keep in mind, it's not just breeding some already narurally existing thing and calling it a robot. Some are "reprogrammed" viruses, some are specialized, lab grown cells, and still others are literally building them like a robot, but using protiens or other microscopic organic matter as the body and moving bits and they achieve their locomotion and other usefulness through the medium they are suspended in.

There's a later chapter called 'Wangs Carpets' that was first published as a standalone short story, and goes even harder.

I think the whole book is available on the authors site, but other formats are a lot more readable.