A recent television commercial for United Parcel Service shows people ordering products on the Internet and receiving them directly into their homes and offices via computer printers and photocopiers. The four products shown being delivered by computer in the UPS spot are a scuba fin, a trombone, an office water bottle with water in it, and a football. The scenarios are depicted with humor and irony and create the illusion of 3-D fabrication of real products.

     The message of the commercial is that until you can have products delivered to you by machines that can automatically create the product for you, there’s always the UPS alternative. The advertising executives who produced the spot felt pretty confident that “until” was eons away.

     Maybe not.

     Scientists are whittling away at the physical limitations of cyberspace, honing in on a burgeoning new technology called the fabber. Short for “automated fabricator”, the fabber is breakthrough technology that automatically manufactures products using digital data.

     While many would see this technology as more fitting to Captain Kirk than Bill Gates, many Fortune 500 companies are, in fact, currently using fabbers to create prototypes of new products that they are considering manufacturing on a large scale. When Ford, for example, is working on a new car design, its engineers will have models fabbed of many of the mechanical components to test how they go together. They may even fab a model of the overall body style to review its visual appearance. In fact, even some smaller companies are using this technology to create mock-ups or models of products they’re interested in manufacturing. They go to “fab shops” which are essentially “3-D Kinko’s” that offer fabbers out on a contract basis.

     However, before the scenarios of the UPS commercial become reality and fabbers become the standard - the norm - for product delivery and fulfillment to personal, individual users, certain key improvements need to be made to the technology as it currently exists.

     Fabbers today are very limited in the materials they use to make the products. While they can use certain types of metals in making a product, they are, for the most part, limited to creating products out of very specific kinds of plastics. So in their current incarnation they wouldn’t make a scuba fin out of the material that is generally used in manufacturing scuba fins. Rather, they would make prototype fins using a material conducive to the fabber’s current capabilities.

     Other improvements are also necessary to make fabbing at home a practical medium for product delivery. Fabbers must operate much more quickly than today’s technologies, they must be made easier to use, and they much come down in price to a reasonable level the average household can afford.

     Also, we’ll need to have an infrastructure in place to allow material delivery systems - that is, systems that will allow individual fabber users to receive the materials necessary for producing the product in their own homes. Future housing developments will offer fab material supply as a standard utility. Just as modern homes today come with plumbing and cable and phone hook-ups, homes of the future may come connected to an underground pneumatic supply network. This would work like the tubes that deliver money to customers in line at a drive-through bank.

     With these technology improvements in place, shopping for a product in the future could go something like this:

1. A consumer goes online to order a product, downloads a digital description, and approves the royalty charge for the use of the data,
2. The fabber sends a message to the pneumatic warehouse to say “I need these kinds of materials,”
3. A pneumatic tube is delivered to the consumer’s home, containing the exact materials necessary for creating the product,
4. The fabber creates the product out of the materials delivered, using the digital data pulled from the Internet.

The Lessons of History: UPS, Take Note

     UPS would do well to learn from the mistakes of the railroad magnates of the early part of this century.

     When the rail barons of yesteryear defined themselves as transportation companies, they limited themselves to trains and rails. Had they realized that the broader definition of “transportation” would include “over roads” and “through air” in the then not-too-distant future, they would have invested in trucking and airlines…and thereby continued their dominance of the 19^th-century economy into the 20^th.

     UPS, which recently floated the largest IPO in US history, is described as the world’s largest transportation company. But the term “transportation” is once again opening up. Limiting the definition of product delivery to transport in trucks and airplanes is short-sighted. By the middle of the 21^st century, fabbers will become a fairly standard means of delivering products. And, just as the Internet has redefined the world of information, so fabbers will redefine the world of manufacturing.

     If you found this interesting, you’ll also want to read:

• The Origins and Direction of the Fabricator Revolution, the farthest-reaching discussion of future fabbers, including “accretive fabrication,” modeled on the growth of biological systems.
• Using Fabricators to Reduce Space Transportation Costs, explains how fabbers are the critical element that will finally make space habitation feasible for the first time in history.