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Will AI Deliver a Real Star Trek Replicator? This Founder Is Making It His Mission

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In a waterfront factory in Brooklyn, one founder is boldly going forward with an ambitious initiative: to make technology from Star Trek real. That entrepreneur is Matthew Putman, and while his vision for life imitating science fiction won't be ready in time for Thursday's premiere of season five of Star Trek: Discovery, Putman thinks he's not far off.

The co-founder and CEO of manufacturing technology company Nanotronics, Putman wants to build the next best thing to Star Trek's Replicator, a fictional device that can rearrange particles to create anything from food and drink to complex machinery. His company, which he founded in 2010, supplies microscopes that use artificial intelligence to manufacturing businesses, which use them to monitor and control their fabrication processes. Nanotronics has raised more than $130 million from investors including Peter Thiel.

So where does Star Trek come in? Putman is currently at work on Cubefabs, a modular fabrication plant that uses a proprietary AI to improve manufacturing efficiency in real time. Similar to a 3-D printer, Cubefabs uses automation across several machines to slice semiconductor crystals into thin wafers, imprint circuitry patterns on those wafers, and etch them into a pre-specified shape. While it can't conjure up a dirty martini like the Replicator, Putman thinks Cubefabs can serve a similar purpose and even hopes it can one day solve the problem of resource scarcity and poverty on Earth.

Cubefabs represents Putman's attempt to create low-cost fabricators that use AI to monitor and control every element of fabrication, from the temperature to the speed of production, all in pursuit of making the final product as "atomically precise as possible" to the original design, Putman says. He anticipates that most Cubefabs will be used to create semiconductor chips, but says the facilities could also be used to improve a variety of manufacturing processes, like reducing the materials and time required to develop lab-grown meat. The first Cubefabs are in development now, and Putman anticipates they'll be up and running within 18 months.

While Cubefabs are designed to be 1/10th the size of the average semiconductor fabricator, they still need at least one full acre of space to fit all the machines necessary for materials production. Putman got the idea for an AI-driven fabrication plant after an experiment he ran years ago, in which he and his colleagues pitted a human engineer against a 3-D printer powered by AI. The result: The AI agent made stronger, more easily replicable parts than the human engineer.

So will we ever see other Star Trek technology in the real world? Putman says that the Holodeck, a virtual-reality room featured in many of the shows, could become a reality sooner than many anticipate, because of the extreme power of mixed reality and haptics technology. While Putman did recently meet someone who's "working on a Warp Drive," he says we shouldn't expect to be beamed up in a Star Trek Transporter anytime soon.

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