DETROIT ? Gov. Rick Snyder, the state?s biggest self-proclaimed nerd, keynoted the second annual Techonomy Detroit conference at Wayne State University where he told a packed house of 600 plus Detroit?s comeback is going on in spite of the way government was operating.

Snyder?s comments came during an informal conversation with David Kirkpatrick of Techonomy Media. Snyder said given a better-run and more efficient Detroit city government on the horizon post bankruptcy, ?think of the possibilities now.?

With people like billionaire Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, pumping billions of dollars into downtown Detroit over the past decade, some 12,000 new jobs have been created.

On other topics, Snyder said the state?s Educational Action Authority ?is not intended to be a massive school district across the state. Hopefully it will be a place of innovation.? He said when it comes to education, ?open source student centered learning is really what it should evolve into.?

And when it comes to Detroit, Snyder said, he?s following the Detroit City Future Plan. ?It?s not like we?re starting from scratch,? Snyder said. ?I have a big book on my desk at Cadillac Place, and when somebody asks what we?re doing in Detroit, I show them the book and say, ?This is what Detroiters decided was a really good idea.??

Snyder added that Michigan has long been a high tech state thanks to the auto industry: ?People think of autos as something separate from technology. That?s a false premise. We need to get people over that. People think of autos as the model T assembly line.?

Snyder said the future of the auto industry is smart, connected vehicles ? and Michigan is hosting the 2014 world congress of the Intelligent Transportation Society next September.

Snyder also argued for liberal immigration policies, saying it?s ?really dumb? that Michigan gives thousands of foreign students a fine education, ?and then we tell them to get out? we should be asking them, ?Would you like an opportunity here???

Detroit News editorial writer Nolan Finley also said many employers are desperate to find people in the skilled trades, such as welding. Finley said he had one such employer in his office who told him he would pay welders $80,000 to $100,000 a year. ?I almost lost two writers,? Finley said.

Another man who puts his money where his mouth is, Josh Linkner of Detroit Venture Partners, described Detroit as the most fertile ground for entrepreneurship.

?We have access to capital, we have talent in spades, we have low cost resources. We just lack connections between some of these things.?

And when it comes to Detroit, Linkner said, ?the ultimate contrarian act is to take the less traveled path, and to me that?s what the story of Detroit is. In Detroit you really get to leave your fingerprints on a great American city.?

Later, in a discussion on manufacturing with Rodney Brooks of Rethink Robotics, Brooks urged the crowd to rethink manufacturing machinery.

?Do any of you have one of these complex devices?? Brooks asked, holding up a smartphone. ?Did any of you go take a course at a community college to learn how to use it? No. It?s designed on some precedents that are common to the culture, it is designed so that you can learn to use it yourself. We in manufacturing like to pride ourselves on how complicated our machines are, so we made them too hard to use.?

Brooks said that manufacturing equipment needs to be as ?plug and play? as electronics are. One example: robots used to find bombs in Iraq that soldiers found useless until the Pentagon put a game-like controller on them.