On a Paris street in the late 19th century, the first-ever electric streetlight flickered to life. Now, nearly 150 years later, the electricity coursing through streetlights and traffic poles powers a lot more than just lights.

In recent years...The humble streetlight and traffic light have become the backbone of the modern smart city, housing a bevy of sensors, communication devices, cameras, and other technologies used to help digitize the streets.

• The fact that so many such posts already exist—New York City has over 315,000 streetlights, for example—makes them an ideal jumping-off point for installing “smart” add-ons.

“For years, it was the dumb piece of infrastructure—it’s like nobody wanted to manage it,” Ian Aaron, CEO of streetlight-focused tech startup Ubicquia, told Emerging Tech Brew.

“Now all of a sudden, the cities are realizing, ‘Wow, I’ve got a streetlight every 50 meters.’ It’s eight to 10 meters high, so it’s perfect for telecom equipment. Oh, and by the way, there’s already power there,” he added.

Let’s take a look at five key smart-city technologies that municipalities are tacking onto lampposts. Keep reading here.—JM

This story is part of our new package exploring smart cities—click here to view the full interactive series.

Soon, the stock photos you come across on the web may have an entirely new image credit: AI.

Wait, what? In late October, Shutterstock announced it would lean into AI-generated imagery, partnering with OpenAI to integrate its DALL-E 2 image-generating tool into the Shutterstock platform. The news comes weeks after Getty Images decided to ban AI-generated content outright.

• Shutterstock is one of the biggest names in stock photography, with a database of more than 424 million images and over 27 million video clips.
• As of September, the company reported more than 600,000 paying subscribers, and its 2021 revenue exceeded $773 million. The company’s enterprise clientele ranges from Microsoft to Mastercard.

How it came together: The company made its decision after more than a year of planning, according to its CPO Meghan Schoen, which started before DALL-E 2 hit the market and set off the ongoing boom in generative AI.

“There were obviously a lot of players out there who were investing in this technology, and it’s really important for us that we have our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the space—and so we wanted to be an active participant and lead the way in some of those conversations,” she told us.

We chatted with Schoen and CEO Paul Hennessy about the integration, which should go live in the coming months, and their vision for AI-generated content on the platform.

Click here to read the conversation.—HF

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

My official title is senior AI solutions architect and data scientist within the office of the CTO for Beyond Limits. It’s anything but traditional, even within the tech industry. So, for people who don’t work in the technology industry, I tell them I’m an AI whisperer.

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

I spent the first few years of my career designing early generations of smartphones, wearable location trackers, Nascar trucks, and other wireless embedded systems, so I’m naturally attracted to AI systems that operate at the edge.

One of my favorite projects involved using AI at the edge for broadcast televised media location tracking and racing, e.g., Nascar race f/x. You can imagine that monitoring and tracking the vehicle during races comes with its own challenges, particularly during bad weather conditions or stability issues caused during the race.

What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

I’m fascinated by technologies that relate to AI safety, especially in the context of data scarcity, where resources for AI decision-making are profoundly limited. The media often associates AI safety with autonomous-vehicle accidents because that’s relatable to most people. However, it is just as applicable to carefully controlling system hardware operating ranges, patient healthcare diagnosis, or stabilizing cryptocurrency trading in organized exchange markets.

AI safety has a place in a large variety of industries, and the potential use cases for AI safety technologies can enable more robust and trustworthy decisions across many platforms. I personally think we should be wary of AI technologies that remove humans from the decision loop, serving as advisors in contrast to automation. We should be particularly aware of those in applications that are prone to unintentional biases, accidents, and high uncertainty.

Stat: Mastodon, the decentralized social network founded in 2016, appears to be a prime beneficiary of the post-Musk migration of Twitter users. The network said it added 230,000 new users in the last week, bringing its total user base to 655,000, its highest-ever level.

Quote: “It’s amazing how primitive our systems are. And I think that’s a risk to healthcare. Certainly it’s a risk to inefficiency, waste, and cost of healthcare, but I also think it’s a quality issue as well.”—Paul Chang, a radiologist at the University of Chicago, told Healthcare Brew

Read: Airlines are exploring some unorthodox airplane designs as they try to figure out how to decarbonize flights.

New in town: What should security and IT pros know about cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM)? In a world of repackaged and renamed tech, see why CAASM stands out from the crowd. Get Axionus’s new ebook here.*

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Look, usually we play it straight with this trivia, but this week we’re making an exception. That’s right: There’s a theme for this week’s news quiz, and it’s smart cities, in honor of our interactive.

Click here to test how much you know about the cities of the future.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• A faster energy transition could mean trillions of dollars in savings
• From Alphabet to Amazon, tech giants aim to do more with less
• How a fifth-generation farmer and software engineer uses tech in his fields