Would it be possible to begin mining asteroids and create a space-based manufacturing infrastructure using...?

Our attempts at artificial intelligence, despite amazing progress, has been abysmal. We can not expect robots to perform complex functions that must be constantly adapted on their own, but the distances are too great for telepresence unless the asteroid is brought into an orbit around Earth, a task with significant risk to us. I think we have to simplify the process as much as possible to the point of building a radiation and micro-meteorite shielded volume that a human spaceship could pilot into to guide the rest of the construction by telepresence. We need to make an absurdly simple manufactured product.

Many asteroids are rock piles, basically lumps of gravel. I think we should send out probes that just scoop up the regolith and distill it to useful metals like iron, titanium, and aluminum. Carbon may be available from dry ice to make steel from the iron. The metals can be drawn into wires, then spun into cables, basically the simplest manufactured component possible. The robots could then knit the cables into torus's and fill them with regolith and slag creating sandbag rings. All this while being carefully nudged along the Interplanetary transport network to L4 or L5. When enough sandbag rings are together, they can be cabled into a cylinder, perhaps thermite welded together with iron oxide and aluminum thermite. Then a small rotating spaceship can be piloted into the radiation shielded interior to guide the rest of the construction. The rest of the construction would be placing several knitted hollow torus that had been thermite welded air tight into the cylinder, placing permanent rare earth magnets in Halbach arrays on the outside rim of the torus's while laying aluminum cables along the inside of the cylinder, this means that when turned, the interior hollow torus's would be maglev suspended inside the outer sandbag cylinder. Then the torus's could have regolith added to form a terrain, dry ice and water ammonia ice to form an atmosphere and water, nuclear reactors such as Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors installed, the resulting CO2 and ammonia atmosphere can be photolysed into a CO2, nitrogen and hydrogen atmosphere, the hydrogen can be collected, vented or used as a fuel or to synthesize hydrocarbons. Th CO2 can be processed by algae and plants into oxygen and carbonate rocks. The multiple torus's inside the cylinder provide redundant biospheres perhaps with different biomes. Colonists can move in and you then have a manned infrastructure in space that can build any manufactured products inside the radiation protected center of the sandbag cylinder. Strap some plasma, ion, and hall effect engines on the hundreds of acres at the endcap of the cylinder and you have an interstellar generation ship.

All this with nothing but wire as a manufactured product.

There are people looking into bringing a small asteroid into earth orbit. This can be done by robotics. The idea is then to send a small crew to rendezvous with it and exploit it's riches.. They are looking for the most expensive minerals/metals, etc, to cash-in on.

If there is a profit to be made - count on it to happen. It is within our technology to do so - but it must show a healthy profit.

Possible - of course.

Probable in the next decade - not likely.

One day who knows.