Michigan's manufacturing past is fueling its tech future

Michigan's struggles have played out on the world's stage. Just after the turn of the century began what's referred to as the state's lost decade, the economy faltered, oil prices skyrocketed and the housing market crashed. Nearly a million jobs left the state between 2000 and 2013, many of them in manufacturing and the automotive industry. For a state of just under 10 million people, the impact was devastating: Unemployment was higher than the national average by more than four percent. Bailouts for Chrysler and General Motors were followed by Detroit's record-setting municipal bankruptcy, but through grit and determination, Michigan started clawing its way back from the brink. Now multimillion-dollar investments in the city from tech titans like Amazon, Facebook and LG make headlines with startling frequency, and a host of tech startups have begun to fill the gaps left by plant closures. On the state's west side lies Grand Rapids, where 20 percent of the area's residents are employed in manufacturing jobs, twice the national average, according to a recent report from the Los Angeles Times. About $30,000 per year -- enough for a single person but hardly enough to raise a family. A recent wage survey found machinists in the region averaged $41,710 per year, around half that of software and application developers. Where humans were once doing the physical labor themselves, they're now supervising several machines at a time or operating as quality control. As time goes on, more areas of low-skill labor will be taken over by artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation in what's being labeled the fourth industrial revolution. "When you walk through a plant, there are going to be very few humans on the floor, but there's going to be hundreds of people that are high-tech [trained], maintaining all those systems, because they're not stupid systems that are just stamping out metal parts," said Tom Kelly, executive director of the Michigan-based nonprofit Automation Alley.