At the tail end of the Obama Administration, the Department of Transportation announced the Smart City Challenge, a first-of-its-kind competition designed to award $40 million to the mid-sized American city with the best vision of how it could evolve into a “smart city.” Nearly 80 cities submitted proposals with their futuristic ideas for their American metropolises, but only Columbus, Ohio emerged as the winner.

But what happened to the losers—in particular, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of six finalists in the 2015 competition?

Just over six years after the contest wrapped up, and on the heels of the government authorizing a bigger batch of smart-city funding, we checked in on Pittsburgh’s smart city efforts.

• The city didn't abandon its plans after missing out on the grand prize: Instead, it strung together millions in local, state, and federal funds in a bid to realize aspects of the proposal, which centered around improving transportation efficiency.

But, but, but...Building a smart city is no easy task—and only this summer will the city of ~300,000 finally begin to break ground on one of the key features of its initial vision, a traffic-management project called “Smart Spines.”

• The plan is to use a combination of CCTV cameras and sensors to collect real-time traffic data, which city staff will use to remotely tweak things like traffic signal timing.

Bottom line: This summer, the Smart Spines project is slated to enter phase one of construction, building out three corridors to start.

The remaining five will be constructed in an eventual second phase. The project is projected to cost $28.8 million, funded with $11 million from a 2016 DOT grant, $11 million in city funds, and the remaining $4.8 coming from the state. In total, the program will renovate about 150 intersections, the Pittsburgh Business Times reports.

Keep reading about Pittsburgh's smart city journey.—JM

Whether you’re a luddite or a tech solutionist, whatever—that’s your business. But new research from Pew provides a window into where a broad swath of the American public—10,260 US adults, to be exact—falls along that spectrum.

Zoom in: The report, which is extensive and worth taking a look at yourself, highlights the medley of excitement, uncertainty, and anxiety the US public feels as it hurtles through an age of exponential technological change.

• Pew’s report focuses on three specific applications of AI and three specific applications of “human enhancement” tech, from gene-editing to brain implants. Uncertainty and ambivalence are key themes in the findings, its authors write.

Still, there is at least one point of consensus: Fewer than half of the respondents believe these technologies will usher in an improvement over the status quo.

By the numbers…

Pew asked respondents whether they thought widespread use of a given technology would be a good or bad idea for society. Take a breath, let’s dive in…

• Facial recognition technology used by police to locate potential suspects or monitor crowds was thought to be a good idea by 46% of respondents and a bad one by 27%. And 27% were unsure.
• Using algorithms to locate false content on social platforms was viewed as good by 38%, bad by 31%, and 30% were unsure.
• Fully driverless passenger vehicles were viewed as good by just 26% of respondents, bad by 44%, and 29% were unsure.
• Robotic exoskeletons that would augment manual laborers’ strength were viewed as good by 33%, bad by 24%, and 42% were unsure.
• Gene editing to reduce a baby’s risk of developing a serious disease was viewed as good by 30%, bad by 30%, and 39% were unsure.
• Brain implants that would allow people to process information more quickly and accurately were viewed as good by just 13% of respondents, bad by 56%, and 31% were unsure.

Big picture: Respondents said that these technologies would be more acceptable if some mitigating steps were adopted (e.g., regular reporting of AV accidents, licenses for exoskeleton operation, additional training around the potential bias of facial recognition).

They also generally believed that these technologies should be held to a higher standard of scrutiny than what exists today.

Click here to read on-site.—DM

Listen to Morning Brew’s Business Casual podcast to hear the business story behind everything! Journalist Nora Ali and comedian Scott Rogowsky bring you conversations with creators, thinkers, and innovators who can tell you what it all means—and why you should care. Check out some recent episodes:

• The Billion-Dollar Psychedelic Drug Business
• Banking for Everyone with Fintech CEO Sheena Allen
• The Oscars: Betting on the Elite Glamor

Russia is becoming politically and economically isolated not just on Earth, but in space too.

After three years of partnership with Roscosmos, Russia’s state-run space corporation, British satellite-broadband provider OneWeb will now launch via SpaceX. The move comes as a surprise, given that SpaceX-owned Starlink and OneWeb are direct competitors in the satellite-broadband space.

• Up until this point, all 428 of OneWeb’s satellites in orbit were launched on Russian Soyuz rockets, through a partnership brokered by French launch-service provider Arianespace.

The move comes after Roscosmos responded to a growing list of sanctions from European and North American nations by holding 36 of OneWeb’s satellites hostage earlier this month, refusing to launch them into space unless OneWeb agreed to a list of demands.

• Roscosmos head, Dmitry Rogozin, stated it would only launch OneWeb’s satellites if the UK government divested its $500 million stake in OneWeb and promised that the satellites would not be used for military purposes.

OneWeb went to the competition instead, signing an agreement with SpaceX. Elon Musk tweeted that he now expects SpaceX to potentially launch around 70% of the world’s spacecrafts this year, up from a previous goal of ~65% prior to the war in Ukraine.

Compare and contrast: OneWeb aims to provide coverage to businesses and governments, whereas Starlink’s market is mostly individual consumers. Starlink says it has 250,000 subscribers across consumer and enterprise, while OneWeb is still launching its constellation. The company expects to have all of its 648 satellites in orbit by year’s end—for comparison, Starlink has already launched 1,469 of its 4,408 authorized satellites.

Zoom out…Besides the tension surrounding OneWeb, there was concern that Russia would leave American astronaut Mark Vande Hei stranded aboard the ISS, but Russia has stated that he will be returned to Earth on March 30.

Read on-site.—JM

Stat: The Department of Energy’s four planned carbon-removal hubs will each aim to pull 1 million tonnes of CO2 from the air—that’s 100x larger than today’s global capacity, but far short of the 10 billion tonnes needed by 2050 to meet Paris Agreement targets.

Quote: “The most important, and one of the most vulnerable, supply chains the American semiconductor industry is facing today is the supply chain of human talents,” Mung Chiang, Purdue University’s Dean of the College of Engineering, told Axios.

Read: Can “no-code” platforms change the world?

Learn: When people start talking dollars and data in business meetings, does it seem like they’re speaking another language? With Morning Brew Quantitative, you can learn how to make data-driven decisions and hold your own with the CFO. Learn more about how MB/Q can help you take your career to the next level.

Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Male birth control could go into trials soon.
• A biotech company claims it can now read most of an IVF-created embryo’s genes.
• A hedge fund bought the rights to Furby, with a bold new plan: To use AI to make the plush toys sentient.
• Italian scientists have created a yeast-free pizza dough.

For Emerging Tech Brew in other mediums: Next Wednesday, our editor, Dan McCarthy, will host a conversation about all things vertical farming with Jason Green, CEO and co-founder of Upward Farms. Oh, and in a few months, we’re going live—our first-ever summit will be in late September.
For a cushier EV charging experience: Electricity America unveiled its plans to build “human-centered” EV charging stations.

For climate fixers: Grist compiled a list of 50 people helping combat the climate crisis—the list is packed with climate-tech founders and visionaries.

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

• The DOE has $3.5 billion to spend on carbon removal. Now what?
• Before layoffs hit Google-owned Looker, workers unknowingly trained their replacements
• California’s vehicle-to-grid experiments offer a glimpse of the future