It’s hard to pinpoint the moment Pittsburgh began its three-decade climb back from the dead, but Red Whittaker marks the comeback from the instant he heard the ominous clack of a door closing behind him when he entered a secured building near the melted heart of Three Mile Island back in 1983.

Whittaker—then a ferociously ambitious former marine building a nascent robotics program at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University that would become the world’s best—was about to test out the ungainly, joy-stick-guided contraption he had designed with a $1.5 million grant to plumb the deadly terra incognita of the basement in Unit 2, the reactor that had partially melted down four years earlier, nearly setting off a nuclear disaster. He’d built the device over six months with a group of 20-something grad students, dispatching their metal-and-wire erector set on wheels to the reactor building, which was filled with radioactive water and debris and bounded by concrete suffused with enough killer gamma radiation to fry any human.

Whittaker, whose mother had steeled his nerves as a kid by taking him up for hair-raising flights in a small plane, was plenty nervous, worried that somehow his team’s invention would end up banging into the wrong thing and sparking a fresh nuclear crisis. Peering at the CCTV feed as the radio-controlled “Remote Reconnaissance Vehicle” slowly descended into the reactor building on a cable, he watched as his baby landed—plop—into the nuclear soup. “The thing I’ll never forget is seeing how it made the water ripple. When I saw those ripples and we started creeping along, and everything was working, I knew we were in business,” says Whittaker, whose current endeavor is no less ambitious if a lot more romantic: landing an unmanned rover on the moon and capturing the $40 million Google Lunar X Prize.

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—it produced a ground-breaking assessment of the extent of the radiation from sensor readings, photographic inspections and core samples taken from the concrete, none of which would have been possible with human hands alone—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.

“Roboburgh,” the boosterish moniker conferred on the city by the Wall Street Journal in 1999 and cited endlessly in Pittsburgh’s marketing materials ever since, may have been premature back then, but it isn’t now: Pittsburgh, after decades of trying to remake itself, today really does have a new economy, rooted in the city’s rapidly growing robotic, artificial intelligence, health technology, advanced manufacturing and software industries. It’s growing in population for the first time since the 1950s, and now features regularly in lists like “the Hottest Cities of the Future” and “Best Cities for Working Mothers.” “The city is sort of in a sweet spot,” says Sanjiv Singh, a Whittaker acolyte at Carnegie Mellon who is working on the first-of-its-kind pilotless medical evacuation helicopter for the Marines. “It has the critical mass of talent you need, it’s still pretty affordable and it has corporate memory—the people here still remember when the place was an industrial powerhouse.”

The rise of the robots is the storyline the city itself embraces because it represents the reassertion of Pittsburgh’s irrepressible identity, its industrial DNA.

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.

But is it a recipe for urban reinvention, proof that Silicon Valleys can flourish anywhere, as a million city managers the world over dream? Why did Pittsburgh make it when so many other industrial-era powerhouses have not—why, in short, is it Roboburgh today and not Detroit?

For all the high-tech whiz-bang—CMU’s labs are an electronic menagerie with robots that slither like snakes, buzz overhead like hummingbirds and furrow into mines like hedgehogs—Red Whittaker, and the people who have worked on the Pittsburgh comeback, will tell you there is no magical formula for post-industrial cities to claw back from the grave. It’s inevitably an all-of-the-above enterprise that in this case included a major environmental clean-up, public-sector incentives to attract businesses, billions of dollars in federal funding and collaborative rule-bending to do things like turn abandoned brownfield sites into gleaming tech headquarters. But perhaps the most critical factor was recognizing that, beneath the collapse, stagnation and misery, the city’s core assets remained largely intact, in the form of human capital housed in the city’s cultural institutions, foundations, an overlooked industrial research sector and above all its great universities—Carnegie Mellon, Pitt, Duquesne—built and endowed by the 19th century robber barons who gave the city its first golden age. Pittsburgh wasn’t dead; it was just sleeping.

From the frontier fortress that gave the city its name, geography has always been another major asset: It sits at the confluence of three navigable rivers, in a valley that funnels population inward and keeps it from sprawling too much. While Pittsburgh’s leadership made its share of mistakes, decision-makers never allowed its infrastructure to wither as badly as in other ailing cities, even after half the town’s population decamped in the last decades of the twentieth century. Detroit—the city whose decline is most often compared with Pittsburgh’s—is headed in a very different direction because it split into two divergent, racially polarized halves: The Detroit of the auto industry, which relocated itself to the sprawling suburban outskirts, and the real Detroit, an abandoned, predominantly poor and monochromatically African-American core that is collapsing after years of neglect, disinvestment and mismanagement.

The bankrupt Motor City is today a vast checkerboard of empty lots and decimated working-class neighborhoods ringing a gleaming, isolated downtown; the Steel City is a densely packed triangle of mid-range skyscrapers surrounded by a thicket of row-house neighborhoods. Well-established ethnic enclaves bent but didn’t break during the bad times, and white flight, while it occurred, was nothing like the Detroit diaspora. Even the snail’s pace of the city’s recovery worked to its advantage: When the rebound took hold in the last decade, the city never saw the kind of speculative real estate madness that afflicted other cities on the “Most Livable” list. A few years ago, when a CMU professor wanted to test the city’s appeal to outsiders, she coaxed a former student working at Google’s perk-filled California headquarters campus to tape pull-and-tear flyers advertising a typical $250,000 four-bedroom Pittsburgh Victorian in the bathroom stalls; they were all gone in an hour.

It’s in our genes—we don’t have to argue with anybody that Pittsburgh is a place where stuff gets made.”

You could write a story about how health care saved Pittsburgh—the first-class University of Pittsburgh Medical Center that accounts for one in five local jobs, a far higher percentage of local employment than the steel industry at its apex—but the rise of the robots is the storyline the city itself embraces because it represents the reassertion of Pittsburgh’s irrepressible identity, its industrial DNA. “The big point is that we’re not going against our core brand,” says Ilana Diamond, founder of Alphalab Gear, a six-year-old nonprofit that provides workspace, funding and networking opportunities so that students can turn their high-tech hardware inventions into start-up companies. “We have always made stuff around here. … That’s what the mills were, right? It’s in our genes—we don’t have to argue with anybody that Pittsburgh is a place where stuff gets made.”

That old identity is hard to shake; President Obama has done events at the CMU robotics center, but when he came to Pittsburgh in late January to push his jobs agenda, he headed straight for an old archetype: a steel plant. “You don’t come to the Steel City without coming to U.S. Steel,” he said.

No one embodies that brains-and-brawn, alpha male-and-algorithms duality more than Whittaker, a grinning Paul Bunyan type astride a campus crawling with hoodie-wearing “Big Bang Theory” kids squinting at smart phones through chunky black frames. “I like this city because it has blood in its veins!” says Whittaker.

***

Pittsburgh is all about the creative destructive of capitalism, and Whittaker and many others knee-deep in the city’s comeback embrace Andrew Carnegie’s motto—“My heart is in the work”—earnestly, without a wisp of irony. For a long, long time, those words had a mocking quality.

From 1970 to 2000 fully 40 percent of the city’s residents would flee as mill and factory jobs vaporized: Forty years ago, the population was about 520,000; now it barely breaks the 300,000 mark, though the region as a whole is far larger. And any story about Pittsburgh’s rebirth must account for the ugly reality that the decently paid, unionized factory workers who built the city haven’t been invited to its higher-wage rebirth. The devastation to the working class wasn’t limited to the city itself: Nearby mill towns like McKeesport, home to 55,355 people in 1940 and less than half that now, have never come back. Braddock, the site of Andrew Carnegie’s first public library, has lost 90 percent of its population since 1920.

The irony that a city built on an industrial working class has reclaimed part of its past industrial glory by developing machines designed, in some cases, to replace human workers is lost on exactly no one. Carnegie Robotics, a new CMU startup generating a lot of buzz, makes a machine that sorts strawberries and can do the work of 800 people; Aethon, a medical robotics company founded in 2002, automates much of hospitals’ tangled internal logistics chains. “We create jobs, we don’t take them away,” growls Whittaker, whose own firm, RedZone Robotics, which he founded while keeping his university research post, builds robots that inspect small sewer lines. “If you want to dig through shit for a living that’s your business. But a robot can get into a tiny pipe, and a person can’t do that, so I’m not taking anyone’s job away.”

This story of Pittsburgh’s reinvention, then, is very much about not only the new politics of urban renewal—but also about the future shape of an American economy that may well be smarter, faster and more innovative, but without the sheer number of good, stable middle-class jobs that powered the great postwar American boom. Of course, it’s still not clear whether the widespread automation of repetitive tasks—the kinds of things a machine can do as well or better than a human—is responsible for the anemic pace of American job creation since 2000. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, productivity and overall employment have generally risen together, with advances in technology spurring a virtuous cycle of re-investment and job creation. In the last decade or so, they have diverged—leading some economists to conclude that robots and smart software are elbowing humans out of the workforce. Two MIT researchers, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, theorize that rapid technological advances have created a “great decoupling” of productivity and employment, which partially explains the malaise. Other researchers fiercely question that conclusion, and argue that the employment stall has as much to do with globalization and the accelerating boom-bust cycle of recent financial crises. “No one knows the cause” of the recent jobs slowdown,” economist David Autor told MIT’s Technology Review. “[It’s] a big puzzle… but there’s not a lot of evidence it’s linked to computers.”

Still, for Pittsburgh natives, especially those old enough to have lived through the bad old days, there’s a certain justice in finally being ahead of the curve on technology. Pittsburgh’s new mayor, Bill Peduto, the grandson of a carpenter who settled his family in the Chartiers Valley just south of the city limits to work in the mills, remembers the veil of gloom descending on his world in the late ‘70s. “I started high school in 1979,” Peduto told me. “Willie Stargell and the Pirates, the ‘We are Family’ team, wins the World Series. The Steelers win the Super Bowl… And Pittsburgh dies. Everything was closing, everybody’s father was losing his job, and all of us who were lucky enough to go to college knew there was no way we could come back.”

The worst was yet to come, during the plague years of 1980 to 1984, when foreign competition and a national recession finally broke the back of the long-sagging steel industry. During that period, 55,000 of the 99,000 remaining industry jobs simply vanished, along with the shuttering of iconic mills that had enriched (and polluted) the region—the McKeesport Tube Works, the Clairton plant, the Saxonburg Mill and the venerable Homestead Steel Works, site of the bloody labor-management battles that established the United Steel Workers as a force to be reckoned with in the 1880s and 1890s.

But the slide had begun years earlier, as the dream of a comfortable blue-collar workforce slammed against the realities of globalization and pennies-an-hour overseas labor. In 1976, a young Harvard grad named David Ignatius took a job with the Wall Street Journal covering the steel industry—at the time the business reporting equivalent of the graveyard shift—and quickly realized he’d been assigned to cover the death of a great American city. “I’ll never forget driving into the city for the first time in my life, the remnants of the Jones and Laughlin steel works that had just been closed,” says Ignatius, who went on to a long career as a Washington Post foreign correspondent and columnist. “It was a bleak warning to anyone entering the city that the industry that had made southwest Pennsylvania was in a death spiral. You could literally see the mills and plants shutting down along the Monongahela [River], one by one… At the time, even the suggestion that there was another life for Pittsburgh beyond steel seemed ridiculous.”

To Ignatius, the worst part was the self-delusion—creative destruction with all the destruction but none of the creativity. Mill owners and labor leaders appeared to be dancing long after the music had stopped—pushing for guaranteed-wage pacts that would buy them a few more years of solvency instead of girding for the industry’s eventual decline by focusing on new technologies and retraining their workers. In reality, the steel industry had never employed more than 10 percent of the Pittsburgh region’s workforce, but the collapse of steel set off a similar cataclysm in other industrial and mining businesses all over the region—which had a vicious knock-on effect, wiping out thousands of small local businesses, ravaging the local tax base and humbling the city’s once-thriving industrial finance sector, anchored by the Mellon family, which had made Pittsburgh a national banking powerhouse third only to New York and Chicago.

This cratering Pittsburgh occupied a central place in the prevailing cultural narrative of American decline in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and the depiction of the city at the time still resonates, and not in a good way: the grim, dead-end life the Vietnam veterans returned to in The Deer Hunter, the zombies overtaking downtown in the Dawn of the Dead movies. Later, there was a counter-genre of municipal resurrection flicks that emphasized the city’s heart and grit— The Fish Who Saved Pittsburgh , about an underdog local basketball team led by Dr. J, and, of course, Flashdance, about the world’s sexiest welder. A few years later, when the Carnegie Museums commissioned a pollster to ask residents to identify a word that best identified their town, the one that came back most frequently was “anxiety.”

Yet even at rock bottom, the city’s white-marble academic backbone held. Carnegie Mellon was founded in 1910 as the Carnegie Technical Schools to make engineers out of the children of low-skill workers in Andrew Carnegie’s steel factories; and the corporate behemoths that ran the town, however myopic they were, invested heavily in research—and accelerated those investments in a last-ditch effort to save their businesses.

Whittaker grew up in a small town 90 miles to the east of Pittsburgh and was entranced by anything mechanical—in a region practically made for engineers, crammed as it was with factories, mills and mining operations, everywhere crisscrossed by western Pennsylvania’s omnipresent railroads. He arrived at Carnegie Mellon in the mid-‘70s, after receiving an engineering degree from Princeton, where he developed a parallel passion for computers. He showed up at precisely the right moment: Raj Reddy—a founding father of robotics—had established the first major program of its kind in the country in conjunction with another Carnegie Mellon professor, Angel Jordan, and a top executive at the struggling Westinghouse Electric. The company was among the first entities to subsidize Reddy’s team, investing $5 million in a project to create some of the world’s first factory robots. Other companies followed, allowing the group to move from borrowed space into a football field-sized former mining bureau warehouse on the side of a railroad line. Whittaker quickly emerged as a leader, a Grade-A engineer with a knack for harnessing abstract technical developments to concrete projects. He had none of the Ivy League squeamishness about working cheek-to-jowl with big industry—and quickly developed many of the early technical advances necessary for factory automation as well as mobile “field robots” used in mining, excavation and farming. He was a first-class engineer who attracted the smartest students from around the world, but he was unapologetically pragmatic and commercial. “One year, it was my goal to get Caterpillar as a client,” he recalled, “and we did.”

As regional planners and city fathers cycled through the usual five-year plans and redevelopment schemes, the Robotics Institute steadily grew through the years after its formation in 1979, with a budget that now tops $65 million, a faculty and student population of 500 and more than 200,000 square feet of indoor research space and 40 acres of outdoor testing grounds on Carnegie Mellon’s main campus and, fittingly, reclaimed industrial space in the city’s Lawrenceville and Hazelwood neighborhoods. Over the years, the institute has spun out at least 30 start-ups employing about 2,000 people (one of them, Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, was acquired by Google in 2011 to develop facial recognition software used to tag photos on social media) and secured some two dozen patents in field robotics. Whittaker has been the face of the operation for much of its existence, in part because of his outsized personality and an affinity for the kind of high-profile public competitions that attract popular attention. In 2005, Sandstorm, an autonomous robot vehicle developed by his “Red Team,” competed in the Pentagon’s DARPA Grand Challenge, travelling 7.4 miles into the desert, a record at the time. Two years later, before Google made an all-out plunge into the robot car race, the team’s robotic SUV—Boss—won DARPA’s Urban Challenge, driving itself more than 60 miles without a driver or a joystick.

***

If Pittsburgh was becoming a lab for innovation, it was also a Petri dish for planners and historians sifting for clues about the fate of post-industrial urban America. In 1987, just as Whittaker was solidifying his standing as the father of American robotics, an urban theorist from New Jersey named Richard Florida descended on Carnegie Mellon to study the difference between distressed American cities that failed and ones that thrived.

If Pittsburgh, with all of its assets and its emerging human creativity, somehow can’t make it in the creative age, I fear the future does not bode well for other older industrial communities and established cities.

His inspiration was a 1961 essay by economist Benjamin Chinitz, which essentially predicted that Pittsburgh’s smokestack economy would eventually collapse due to its over-reliance on the steel sector—and that cities with more diverse, entrepreneurial economies untethered to resource extraction would fare better when times got tough. A region’s ability to adapt to change, Chinitz wrote, was “a function of certain traditions and elements of the social structure which are heavily influenced by the character of the area’s historic specializations.” In other words, New York with its legacy of diversity and entrepreneurialism, was a lot better off than steel-addicted, company-town Pittsburgh. Florida’s central thesis, derived in part from his on-the-ground observations in Pittsburgh over the next two decades, held that successful cities were defined by a dominant “creative class” that fostered innovation and encouraged the in-migration of similarly exalted cranial talent. The idea that cities with lots of smart people were better equipped to weather economic convulsion was nothing new. What was novel about Florida’s idea was that he isolated the culture of a city—measured by its ethnic diversity, its openness to gay and lesbian residents and its general attractiveness to the twenty- and thirty-something engineers, writers, scientists, academics and artists who would act as elite cultural anchor babies—and the arbiters of whether a place was cool enough to, in turn, attract succeeding generations of like-minded innovators.

By the time Florida published his landmark book, The Rise Of The Creative Class, in 2002, Pittsburgh had already begun attracting tech companies—but he rated it as only middling on the creative-class scale, well below the San Franciscos, Austins and Seattles—but above Memphis, Buffalo and Vegas. He gave Pittsburgh’s institutions high marks for investing in technology and economic development but argued that they had “been slow to realize” the powerful magnet of cultural factors—and the need to cultivate a cool image. “City leaders continue to promote Pittsburgh as a place that is good for families, seemingly unaware of the demographic changes that have made young people, singles, new immigrants, and gays critical to the emerging social fabric,” he wrote, asking: “Is there hope for Pittsburgh?” and rattled off a succession of incipient harbingers of change: the recent in-flow of tech firms, an uptick in foreign-born students and medical professionals— a new Hindu temple even—and an “increasing status” as a gay center marked by Showtime’s decision to shoot “Queer as Folk” in town.

“If Pittsburgh, with all of its assets and its emerging human creativity, somehow can’t make it in the creative age, I fear the future does not bode well for other older industrial communities and established cities, and the lamentable new class segregation among cities will continue to worsen,” he chided.

Last year, Florida took something of a victory lap, noting that the older generation of civic leaders—whose idea of development centered around huge sports arenas and economic development projects like urban shopping malls—had died off, allowing a new generation room to pursue a more organic, “bottom-up” strategy rooted in academia, high tech and the arts. “Pittsburgh’s revival has been no overnight sensation. It took the better part of a generation or two for it to get to where it is now,” he wrote—adding that the city was still hampered by its relative lack of ethnic and racial diversity. “But without a doubt, it has turned a corner.”

During the intervening decade, Florida had gone on to become a famous (and well-compensated) apostle of urban renewal, a charismatic management consultant with a catchy slogan for cities—“technology, talent and tolerance.” But the locals were not among his greatest admirers. No one denied that Florida had a point about the stodgy culture (in the early 2000s, young entrepreneurs were summoned to discuss economic development strategy at the old-boy Duquesne Club downtown only to be turned away because they weren’t wearing ties, per the club’s dress code).

But down in the trenches, program officers at local foundations who were trying to hasten the transformation thought Florida had the sequencing backwards. “We needed talent more than tolerance. The tolerance follows the talent,” says Christina Gabriel, who funneled millions into tech start-ups during more than a decade as an officer at the Heinz Endowments. “The thing that really mattered was time… A lot of the older people retired and were eventually replaced by a new generation of people who got it… It takes time. You can accelerate change a little bit, but not a lot.”

Sure, all those cool coffee shops, bookstores, new cultural venues and reclaimed green spaces helped draw talent, she says. But the bigger sea change from her point of view came when the city began attracting a new generation of more sophisticated investors, like the Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins and Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, who were willing to take calculated risks on the unpredictable cycle of innovation and commercialization. “The trouble with Pittsburgh isn’t that it doesn’t have enough money, it’s who’s spending it,” says Gabriel, an MIT-trained engineer who served as Carnegie Mellon’s chief technology officer from 1998 to 2006. “Money is a commodity, and you want it tied to a network of people who understand your industry… Investors who are naïve or predatory don’t help you long term—the CEO of a car-wash chain doesn’t get tech.”

One thing that unites Florida and his critics: They don’t want to see the city turn into a reverse Detroit, with affluence clustered around the universities and the downtown core while poverty is pushed out to neighborhoods and suburbs on the margins. For all its flaws as a long-term economic model, the steel-based industry of the 20th century spread the wealth around town in the form of decent-paying, low-skill jobs. That simply isn’t the case anymore: According to a 2013 Brookings Institution report, 79 percent of people living below the federal poverty line in the Pittsburgh metro region are scattered in the suburbs—far outpacing the country’s 55 percent average.

“The big challenge now is figuring out a way to disseminate the city’s new prosperity to all of its residents, not just the high-tech guys,” says Peduto, 49, who just ran and won the mayor’s job on a promise to create “the first progressive administration for a Rust Belt city in America.”

***

As recently as 2000, the imperative was simply to staunch the bleeding. Pittsburgh had an unemployment rate higher than Rust Belt cohorts like Cleveland, and was still hemorrhaging young people. At times, the local efforts to lure them back were comical: In 1999, a regional marketing group put together a television ad campaign centered around Border Guard Bob, an imaginary ranger type who would literally halt residents on their way out and persuade them to stay. (Wiser heads prevailed, and pulled the plug on the idea.) But around 2003, the recovery finally took root and the city’s unemployment rate started to dip, with an interlude courtesy of the Great Recession (it stands at 6.6 percent as of November, below the national average and significantly better than Cleveland’s 7.3 percent or Detroit’s 9.3 percent). The post-9/11 wars— and consequent massive buildup in Washington’s defense spending—brought a surge of federal contracts to the region, much of it funneled through Carnegie Mellon. A network of city leaders also came together and managed to completely overhaul miles of riverfront land, seeding billions of dollars in private development. By 2009, for the first time in decades, the population began to grow, and it was getting younger. Not by much, but it was a landmark moment for a city with an abandonment complex. Part of the economic improvement had nothing to do with robots or high tech—the region also has abundant natural resources, and has been boosted by the recovery of newly tappable shale-gas deposits—but it was also clear that the university-industry pipeline that had been painstakingly laid over the years was finally starting to produce for the larger economy.

Yet none of these factors would have added up to a civic resurgence without the collaboration of a surprisingly small circle of interconnected actors—a couple of hundred people at most—who have worked on the city’s rebirth with plodding determination, as if Pittsburgh itself were one of Red Whittaker’s space robots. At Carnegie Mellon, even the biggest stars retain an underdog mindset that keeps them connected to the build-up-Pittsburgh movement and invested in the gritted-teeth war for talent with tech titans on the coasts. The city’s most celebrated young scientist-entrepreneur, crowdsourcing pioneer and CMU professor Luis von Ahn, began as a Ph.D. student at the school and has remained there despite huge financial success in designing CAPTCHA (the ubiquitous type-this-word test most websites now use to determine if you are a human or a computer) and the popular Duolingo, the 2013 Apple “app of the year,” which uses crowdsourcing technologies to teach foreign language to users. “Some of the stuff you see coming out of Silicon Valley… everybody there is talking about the same things and pumping each other up,” von Ahn told an interviewer last year. Pittsburgh, by contrast, fostered “different thinking,” the 35-year-old McArthur “genius” grant recipient added.

Von Ahn, already rich thanks to his business deals with Google, decided to headquarter Duolingo’s 27-person office in Shadyside, right off the Carnegie Mellon campus, rather than in Boston or in the more predictable Silicon Valley, keeping him close to the network of engineering talent the place has carefully nurtured. He himself, of course, is a product of that scientific pipeline at the school and an example of how the accumulation of talent is slowly building on itself. His mentor was CMU professor Manuel Blum—a Turing Prize winner who is considered among the most important theoretical mathematicians in the world—and who has taught many of the country’s top experts on algorithms, the mathematical bedrock of all artificial intelligence and high-level computing. In fact, CMU’s computer science department is a Blum family business. Blum’s son Avrim is also a full tenured professor, specializing in machine learning and game theory. His wife Lenore, another tenured computer science professor and one of the first women in the world to rise to prominence in the male-dominated field of theoretical math, first met Blum in Pittsburgh in 1959 when she briefly attended architecture school at what was then the Carnegie Institute of Technology. The couple returned in 1999, after stellar careers at the University of California at Berkeley, for two reasons: The Blums had always loved the city—and Avrim, who had been teaching there for a decade, was starting a family.

Blum was a scientist first, but she was also a relentless networker and quickly identified the principal source of the city’s post-industrial growing pains: A lot of the school’s top computing and engineering talent were getting cash offers they couldn’t refuse from Mountain View, Seattle and Boston. In the early 2000s, during the height of the Internet bubble, Microsoft recruiters would try to entice her kids with jobs as they walked from classroom to classroom. “Pittsburgh didn’t have the kind of high-tech infrastructure that California and Boston had, which is why everyone would graduate and leave,” she said. “That continues, in my view, to be our greatest challenge.”

In some circles, there’s a gnawing worry that the city, for all its assets, can’t compete at the highest levels for the really big tech projects. One CMU official, who asked not to be identified, predicted that Pittsburgh’s scrappy push to pioneer driverless cars would eventually be subsumed by the Google mastodon—and that the capital needed to commercialize such a project, $500 million or more, was “FU money” in Mountain View and an impossible stretch in the Steel City. There’s even a sense that Google’s increased local presence, while welcome, presages a takeover of sorts—and that the company, which is officially working on its search technology, will increasingly move in to monetize the city’s robotics and artificial intelligence innovations. Over the last year, Google has in fact bought eight robotics firms from all over the country, a fact that few at CMU have failed to notice.

• 

  What Works

  PHOTOS: Robots at Work

  By MARK PETERSON/REDUX

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  What Works

  PHOTOS: From Steel City to Roboburgh

  By MARK PETERSON/REDUX

Characteristically, the Carnegie Mellon group is looking to compensate with its now well-honed mix of underdog pluck and algorithmic brains. In 2007, Lenore Blum founded Project Olympus, a tech incubator that offers advice, micro-grants between $25,000 and $50,000, incubator space and networking events. Its impact is still relatively modest, but growing: Since its founding, Olympus has overseen the formation of 89 companies—67 by students and 22 by faculty—which have, in turn, attracted $68 million in second-stage funding. One of them, Dynamics—which produces a next-generation magnetic strip for credit cards—attracted $35 million from Bain Capital two years ago.
But its real purpose is keeping more smart graduates in town, and by that measure it’s working. “We’re doing a lot better at that,” adds Mayor Peduto, who is friendly with Blum. “We tend to do better with the slightly older folks, people in their 30s who want to start a family here.”

Ultimately, the city’s greatest asset might be its memory—the pain and humiliation of the collapse still acts as a goad, and encourages people in positions of authority to bend the rules when they get in the way of good idea. The old image of Pittsburgh used to be anchored in the immovable soot-stained brick and iron of the smokestack; increasingly, it’s being defined by the mobility of robots and the protean flexibility of the people who build them.

A few years back, Red Whittaker was hoping to access one of the dozens of played-out mines in the hills that ring the city in hopes of field-testing a new robot on wheels that would automatically produce three-dimensional images of the craggy, hazardous interiors, a machine that could be used, he hopes, to help rescue trapped miners and speed up recovery efforts. The problem was that federal regulations made it difficult and expensive to crack open sealed-off mines. So Whittaker put out the word to his friends in the contracting and excavation business: If you accidentally open up an entrance, give me a call. Soon after, one of Whittaker’s buddies found just such an opening, but as Red’s team was about to load up the gear and head out, he had second thoughts. “We were talking about breaking the law,” he says. So he rang CMU’s president at the time, Jared Cohon, to make the ask. There was a pause, and a sigh.

“Okay, Red,” Cohon said. “Do it.”