The factory of the future is already here in California

Wednesday

Newt Gingrich Former House Speaker; Chairman of Gingrich 360

By Straight Arrow News

Divergent Technologies runs an advanced factory in California that boasts of next-generation “universal robotic assembly” and AI-driven industrial 3D printing. The combination of these emerging technologies, alongside others, aims ultimately to deliver better products at lower prices and faster speeds.

Among other items, the factory works on goods for U.S. military defense. Industrial production capacities have lagged behind in the United States in recent decades, a fact that experts across the political spectrum have agreed is now a national security vulnerability.

Watch the above video as Straight Arrow News contributor Newt Gingrich explains what the Divergent factory is, why he calls it “the factory of the future,” and how he says it might help tip the balance of great power competition between the United States and China.

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The following is an excerpt from the above video:

I recently had the opportunity to go to Los Angeles and visit a factory which is probably the most advanced factory in the world. It’s called Divergent. And Divergent is a factory which uses artificial intelligence, 3D printing, robotics, and very advanced chemistry to be able to produce faster, cheaper, better than any factory on the planet. It’s the most advanced factory anywhere in the world.

What they do is very simple. They have an artificial intelligence system which looks at the project, reshapes it, rethinks it, simulates a dozen or more ways of doing it, and finally finds the most effective, least expensive way to produce that product. That’s then communicated to 3D printing. All of this is being handled with robotics, and in a number of cases, they have very specialized chemists who are working to get just exactly the right compound so that whatever they’re made is going to be done stronger and lighter than any alternative.

Now they’re doing such a good job that really advanced companies like Bugatti, Ferrari, McLaren all use them. General Atomics, which has been building the Predator, has actually hired them to build a next-generation cruise missile and came back and reported publicly that they had taken 98% out of the complexity of the parts. They had taken a very substantial amount of weight out of the vehicle, which means you can either have more fuel and fly longer or you can have a bigger warhead, and that they had all done it faster and cheaper than anything ever done before.

I recently had the opportunity to go to Los Angeles and visit a factory which is probably the most advanced factory in the world. It’s called divergent. And divergent is a factory which uses artificial intelligence, 3d printing, robotics, and very advanced chemistry to be able to produce faster, cheaper, better than any factory on the planet. It’s the most advanced factory anywhere in the world. What they do is very simple. They have an artificial intelligence system which looks at the project, reshapes it, rethinks it, stimulates a dozen or more ways of doing it, and finally finds the most effective, least expensive way to produce that product that’s then communicated to 3d printing. All of this is being handled with robotics, and in a number of cases, they have very specialized chemists who are working to get just exactly the right compound so that whatever they’re made is going to be done stronger and lighter than any alternative.

Now they’re doing such a good job that really advanced companies like Bugatti, Ferrari, McLaren, all use them General Atomics, which has been building the predator has actually hired them to build a next generation cruise missile, and came back and reported publicly that they had taken 98% out of the complexity of the parts. They had taken a very substantial amount of weight out of the vehicle, which means you can either have more fuel and fly longer, or you can have a bigger warhead, and that they had all done it faster and cheaper than anything ever done before. So these remarkable things being done at divergent the Air Force came to them and said they needed one part, a very particular part, for a very old set of c1 30 transports going back to the 1950s and they made that part over the weekend, came in cheaper, better, faster than anybody could possibly have done it, and then ran into the Air Force bureaucracy, and it took about seven weeks to get total approval for something which they built in less than three days.

I think divergent is probably the factory of the future. I suspect in the next couple years, there will be 100 or more plants like divergent around the country, and they will allow us to leapfrog past the Chinese, not just to keep up with them, but to go so far beyond them that there’ll be no comparison. For example, 100 divergent factories could produce 750,000 cruise missiles in a year, but they actually have greater capacity than that. They can switch from building one product to another product in about three hours, a level of flexibility that no other factory in the world could match. And they’re doing it while they’re redesigning the product, making it more compact, less expensive, lighter and able to produce it in a much simpler way divergence a remarkable place. You can find it on Google, and I think you’re going to see a lot about it in the next few years. You.