These are times of change…

One of the main pictures on our homepage is a side by side comparison of an old 1970s television set and smart phone of the modern era. The caption with the photos reads… “These are times of change, and change brings opportunity”

The concept of that graphic is that technology has the ability to be very disruptive and change the way we all live (in a good way). It can challenge the status quo and create opportunities that were not previously visible.

Last week, we came across a great article titled, “The Robots that Saved Pittsburgh: How the Steel City avoided Detroit’s fate.”

Read the full article here.

What we loved about this article was the story of how the former “Steel City” was reborn through innovation, robotics, and technology.  It’s a fascinating case study – and in many ways, it’s the antithesis of what happened in the “Motor City.” Detroit and Pittsburgh were both cities whose identities were rooted in their history as blue-collar manufacturing towns. At one point, Pittsburgh was facing the same problems that have haunted Detroit (which have led to the city’s eventual bankruptcy, exceptionally high unemployment, large and steady population decline, with a dissapearing middle-class). So, why did the Motor City deteriorate into the abyss while the Steel City reinvented itself, avoiding a similar fate?

The simple answer: Pittsburgh embraced change. It became a pioneer in new technology and specifically robotics. Consider the following excerpt which gives us a glimpse:

… That same year, 1983, Pittsburgh’s unemployment rate reached 17.1 percent and the city was losing more than 4,000 people a month. The steel industry that had built modern Pittsburgh, funded its museums and mansions, its football team and its aspiring middle class, was cratering, never to return. But the success of Carnegie Mellon’s Three Mile Island robotics team… would set into motion a spectacular, three-decade cycle of innovation, investment and expansion that put Whittaker and his protégés on the leading edge of their new field and created a cool cottage industry that has come to define a city’s resurgence…

…Improbably for a blue-collar town that seemed headed for the scrap heap when its steel industry collapsed, Pittsburgh has developed into one of the country’s most vibrant tech centers, a hotbed of innovation that can no longer be ignored by the industry’s titans. Carnegie Mellon is Google’s biggest rival in the race to build a driverless car, partnering with GM to build a robot Cadillac that has been humanlessly tooling around Route 19, just outside city limits. In 2011, Google opened a posh, 40,000-square-foot office in an old Nabisco factory in the city’s East Liberty neighborhood, ramping up last year to 350 people, with more on the way. Bill Gates and other Silicon Valley moguls have invested millions of dollars in Aquion Energy, a start-up spun out of CMU that is developing next-generation batteries and producing them in nearby Westermoreland County, not China. Apple, RAND and Intel also have outposts in town and Disney, which has tapped the university’s computer and robotics talent for years, is partnering with the school to improve cinematic graphics and to develop hominid robots that can gently hand objects to people by predicting the movement around them. All told, Pittsburgh’s tech and education sectors now account for some 80 percent of the high-wage jobs in the city, and robots are just the most visible piece of this miraculous turnaround of a city on the brink.

What a great story! It is truly inspiring to see how so much good can come out of seemingly bad situations. Robotics turned out to be a truly disruptive technology for the city of Pittsburgh. In fact, for years now much of the city’s marketing materials uses the term, “Roboburgh”. We can’t help but wonder, “what will be the catalyst for a rebirth in Detroit?”

It is exciting to be living in a day and age where we are on the precipice of new disruptive technologies. Take 3D printing for example. This technology is already being implanted around us every day.  Did you know that Nike uses it to make soccer cleats?  Or that GE uses it to produce jet engines? Several other companies around the world are this new technology to print everything from orthodontics, prosthetics… even human tissue! That’s right – someday hospitals may be able to print a new liver for a patient needing a transplant!

Click here for a full article on 3D printing that was published on Bloomberg in May of last year.

This is just one of the ways new technology might disrupt all of our futures… again, in a good way!

Categorized in: Blog

This post was written by Conscient Capital