Amid all the buzz around the need to tighten local supply chains, the aspirations and capabilities of technology are finally converging to enable a new age in manufacturing. No, we have not yet achieved “Star Trek” replicators or sentient robots, but 3D printing and collaborative automation have recently made great strides. Now, generative AI is poised to take design and creativity to the next level and push our manufacturing capabilities to their full potential.
The turbulence of the last few years has every CEO thinking about creating resilient and sustainable supply chains. For the United States, that has meant rebuilding a manufacturing industry after four decades of letting it flounder. Once the center of manufacturing, the U.S. sent millions of jobs overseas and saw little innovation in its factories as China stepped in to fulfill our needs.
While U.S. manufacturing took a backseat, however, the technology around additive manufacturing (AM), robotics, machine learning and cloud computing has continued to mature. With the government now supporting reshoring through incentives like President Biden’s AM Forward, and generative AI exploding into our real world, we are in a position to not only revitalize U.S. manufacturing but revolutionize it.
While AM was imagined by science fiction writers back in the 1940s and 1950s, Chuck Hull wouldn’t print the first 3D part until 1983. Two decades later, when I joined the nascent 3D-printing industry, connectivity was nonexistent. AI was still nothing but science fiction. Robots couldn’t communicate with each other, let alone collaborate with humans or learn. Even when I gave my 2014 TED talk “What’s Next in 3D Printing,” the technology was not yet robust or industrial enough for everyday practical uses.
From the start, we envisioned AM’s various production capabilities and recognized that the process would become cost-effective, efficient and sustainable. We also imagined we’d be able to make customized dental aligners widely available to customers, but first we had to wait for innovators to create the digital thread to turn a photo into a printable file.
Our biggest dream remains that we will only have to say out loud, “Make me a wheel,” and computer-aided design software would come up with something beyond our wildest imaginations. With the arrival of generative design and chatbots like ChatGPT, we are actually, suddenly, almost there.
As we seek to reshore manufacturing, Industry 4.0 is being fueled by exponential technologies like ubiquitous cloud connectivity, infinite computing power and inexpensive sensoring capabilities that enable real-time data acquisition and visualization, machine learning and intelligence.
Today’s collaborative robots don’t just communicate with each other and digital operational systems; they work alongside humans, supporting local manufacturing by answering the ongoing staffing shortage and enhancing consistency, accuracy and speed-to-market.
We are also beginning to see what generative AI can actually do, which is why we are right on schedule to change the way—and the places—we make things.
Having only comprised 0.1% of the global manufacturing market as of 2021, some may argue AM has been slow to reach mainstream acceptance. It has, in fact, been right on pace. For perspective, computer numerical control (CNC) is now in its eighth decade, while robotics is going into its seventh. With 3D printing only in its fourth decade, it has grown alongside other manufacturing modalities and, as foundational patents created by industry pioneers have expired, seen great innovation.
While stories of 3D-printed homes and rockets grab the headlines, AM has quietly made headway in manufacturing. In addition to changing dental care and aerospace design, industrial AM machines are employed in large factories and desktop AM printers power small businesses.
As speed, materials and costs have improved, manufacturers initially embraced the benefits of local prototyping. Today, they can finally justify the economics of going to production with 3D printing—with the percentage of companies leveraging AM to build production parts and jigs, fixtures and tooling almost doubling since 2017, and the production of parts nearly tripling.
The AM market is now predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20.8% from 2022 to 2023, and to some degree, this reflects one more way the emergent capabilities of AI are changing our world.
Engineers today still largely design mechanical components as if they are going to be manufactured conventionally, and this poses a challenge since designing for AM is fundamentally different. While this knowledge gap has hindered the accelerated adoption of AM in production, generative design is quickly closing it.
Using generative AI, designers are empowered with complete freedom of creation. Instead of relying on the knowledge base passed down over generations as humans do, generative design can take rules straight out of nature and apply biomimicry, which inherently increases strength, flex, performance and durability while reducing the overall material content.
The collaborative work between humans, generative design and AM promises opportunities we’ve yet to imagine—with hyper-local ecosystems in which we not only collaborate with technologies like AM, robotics and language recognition interfaces, but have a dialogue with them.
As technologies continue to converge and humans continue to find new ways to augment our abilities, we can completely dismantle and reimagine supply chains while decreasing our carbon footprint.
Manufacturing is poised to once again become one of the most exciting fields. We must continue to innovate to boost end-use production at scale and post-processing automation, delivering the materials, workflows and generative superpowers to push the boundaries of what has been accomplished so far and make the coming renaissance a reality.
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