A new form of manufacturing is finally bearing fruit. The old form of manufacturing is the assembly line. The very phrase “assembly line” is synonymous with rapid and efficient manufacturing. But soon we’ll do much better. The funny thing is that the new form of manufacturing is the most ancient of all: gestation. Call it Womb 2.0.
You can call it 3D printing if you prefer, but I think that misses the biggest point here. We’re actually moving forward to (and back to) a biological model. Consider the cow. All she needs is some grass (and a small DNA download) and she can build you another cow. All the articulation, all the value-add, is done in utero, on site. She doesn’t have to coordinate a far-flung network of horn suppliers, udder contractors, and hoof makers. She doesn’t manage warehoused inventories of tongue and tail sub-assemblies. She doesn’t even need a lot of space.
cow + cheap local materials + digital spec + time = new cow
You might think, compared to assembly lines, that this biological construction model can’t scale. Except for the fact that it obviously can. Every farm product you’ve ever consumed was first created at the scale of one animal or plant at a time. Every egg came from exactly one chicken. It’s a different kind of scaling from Ford’s River Rouge Complex, but it does scale. And it scales in the simplest possible way. Need more stuff? Make more wombs. Need different stuff? Give the wombs different instructions.
Scale works in the other direction, too. Wombs have the ability to scale down in a way that assembly lines don’t. You would never build an assembly line to make a dozen items. You need to know that you’re going to build thousands of units. This requires you to make enormous bets on products. But with a womb-based construction, your cost floor is much lower. You can make small bets and only scale up when it pays off. The flexibility this gives you is breathtaking. You can tweak designs and optimize in a way that is truly biological, with small variations that will propagate if successful.
Plenty has been written about 3D printing. The reason I’m especially excited about 21st century gestation right now is because I’m seeing a critical mass of real businesses on the verge of making real money. What we’ve talked about is happening.
- Mighty Buildings prints small buildings with a UV-cured resin.
- Relativity Space prints rockets with the world’s largest metal printer.
- Czinger prints the 21C hypercar.
All these companies use a tiny amount of manufacturing floor space relative to their old-school alternatives. They work with relatively simple raw material inputs, and they can be modulated rapidly by software.
womb + raw material + digital spec + time = new product (=> profit!)
I think it’s worthwhile to think of this process not as 3D printing, but as gestation. We’re finally learning from the master.
The cow has much to teach us.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 