A city is the culture of its residents and not real estate. People migrate to San Francisco and Silicon Valley to garner the energy of the wild, wild West of software. People migrated to Detroit for the hard hustle work ethic of manufacturing.

The book, "Invisible Talent Market," highlighted: "There are 92 post-secondary institutions in San Francisco Bay and 27 in San Francisco borders alone, not including the various coding academies or apprenticeship programs. In comparison, there are 79 post-secondary institutions in New York City, 54 in Boston Metro, 45 in Metro Atlanta, 28 in Metro Detroit and 20 in Washington, D.C."

It is easy to see San Francisco invested in its residents to become the epicenter of innovation and software development, leading Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist, to declare boldly, "Software is eating the world."

Detroit has the grand opportunity to boldly declare we are the epicenter for automation by investing in Detroit residents. Dell Chief Technology Officer John Roese just stated "extreme" automation will be required to produce an autonomous vehicle, meaning every man, woman, boy and girl must be involved in automation.

Detroit needs automation reskilling to train the entire community, thousands at a time, in the internet of things, mobility, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. I created Automation Workz Institute (autoworkz.org) to do just that. During our pilot, we engaged 757 Detroiters simultaneously, with a blended (online instructor-led course), Introduction to IoT.

While the city of Detroit declared our projects a failure for traditional 20th century workforce development, they missed the fact that Detroit needs radically innovative 21st century workforce development. A $250 million general obligation bond executed for automation reskilling would shake up Wall Street as Detroit declares it is set to become the automation capital of the world while simultaneously creating income increases that would power "extreme" economic growth.

Let's power an extreme automation revolution. Retool the blight removal bond as an automation reskilling bond.

Ida Byrd-Hill is president of Uplift Inc.