Why U.S. allies are saying 'no' to Trump

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And be interesting to see what country would help us with a very small endeavor which is just

keeping the straight open. President Trump threatens NATO allies to help the U.S. reopen the

Strait of Formals. It's Monday, March 16th and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston.

I'm Shekel Thuyuri. Today on the show, AI is coming to a fast food joint near you.

Hundreds of restaurants are outfitting drive-through workers with listening headsets.

So this is certainly not new and it certainly seems like yet another salvo in the use of AI

technologies to surveil and manage workers. And Celtic music just keeps growing in popularity.

So much so that Japan is producing its own Irish music bands.

But first, Israel is expanding its offensive against the Iranian-supported militia

Hezbollah by sending ground troops into Lebanon. The U.S. military says Iran has carried out

more than 300 retaliatory missile and drone attacks throughout the region since the war began,

hitting targets in Kuwait, Iraq, the UAE, and Israel, among others.

Iran is also cut off ship traffic through the Strait of Formals, pushing up global energy prices.

The national average for a gallon of gas in the U.S. is now $3.72, according to AAA.

That's 70 cents higher than before the war began. President Trump is now pressuring

several countries to help the U.S. reopen the Strait of Formals by sending warships there.

The U.S. is also focusing its air campaign on Carg Island, a key port in the Persian Gulf,

and hub of Iran's oil industry. Nagar Mortezavi is a senior fellow at the Center for

International Policy in Washington, D.C. and host of the Iran podcast. Here's her conversation

with Peter O'Dowd. So President Trump says China, France, Japan, South Korea, and the UK

should help the U.S. reopen the Strait of Formals. First of all, how would that work? And maybe

more importantly, will anyone agree to actually do it? Well, yeah, the important part is it seems

like no one wants to be part of this because it's not very clear how it's going to be done the way

the Iranians are keeping it. As they said, they haven't kept it closed or just not letting

passage to any ships that are in any way related to the other side of the enemy. They have strategic

control over the Strait. This is essentially off the vast coasts of Iran. And this is a day that

the Iranians had been preparing for for years, if not decades. And they're doing it in

unconventional way as part of a bigger asymmetric war. They have drones. They have smaller missiles

that can come from many, many possible locations within the Iranians. So there also have speedboats

that can be in the water. So I'm not very sure if there's actual planning and how to be reacting

to this Iranian strategic control of that. And that's probably part of the reason why there isn't

much interest from from other parties and allies, especially China. I mean, the Iranians are

allowing passage to China. So requesting China to be part of it, I think, was the strangest,

but just in general, we haven't seen much interest. And also this is tied to the fact that in general,

we don't see much purpose and much planning for this war to be launched, let alone the expansion

and the continuation of it. We see that Trump is reportedly considering a seizure of the

Carg Island oil depot. The US bombed military targets on the island over the weekend spared

its oil facilities. How important is that island there in the northern part of the Persian Gulf?

How strategic is it both to the US and Iran? It's very important to Iran. This is a small island

that has one of the most important well facilities of Iran. It's one of the pillars of the Iran

economy and it's also their strategic, the location geographically. So this is going to be taking

the war to the next level. And the Iranians have vowed that they will in return target oil

facilities in the region, starting with wherever the US has interest, which we can know as many.

And so I think we will we should take Iranian seriously as far as I thought, because whatever

we've seen in the different stages that they've taken, that they had been threatening before

the war started and after the war started, it actually made good. The other part as far as

actual troops on this island. I mean, this would be essentially a gift to the Iranian side because

they are looking for US targets for US service members, which right now are out of almost out

of harm's way from Iran. The carriers just so far away from Iranians and the reach of the Iranian

missiles that they haven't been able to inflict too many casualties on the US side. But imagine if

you bring so many troops essentially into Iranians right off of their coast, this will just bring

it to the next level for the Iranian side as well. Let me make sure I understand what you're saying,

because 2,500 US Marines are on their way to the region from the Pacific. Are you saying that

when you hear that, those could be potential ground forces? I mean, that's one of the issues being

discussed as far as where they go. One of the plans could be that this may be going to the

hard island. Now, I don't know how serious these are because again, I think one of the problems

on the US side is that there doesn't seem to be a courier in planning for the war. But the suggestion

at least that with how the Iranian side understands this is that if US forces get any closer to Iran,

they would also potentially be in the reach of these Iranian missiles, either which they aren't

right now. And so that would also essentially bring this to the next level for the Iranian side

as far as inflicting pain to the US, which is part of the strategy that they've been pursuing.

I have about a minute left. I want to ask you about the Israeli military moving deeper into

southern Lebanon planning for what could be the largest ground invasion of that country since 2006.

Israel says it wants to disarm Iranian-backed Hezbollah. What's the end goal for Israel here,

do you think, in Lebanon? I mean, they've been talking about going at Hezbollah forever. Hezbollah

is seen as a major threat to Israel from their viewpoint. And they've been timing again,

using as much force as possible to try to basically remove that threat from their border. And it just

hasn't seen possible until now, as well as very much embedded in southern Lebanon and beyond just

a military wing as part of the Lebanese political scene. It's very much embedded even in parts of

the society. So it's been very, very difficult. And I think even though it's part of that asymmetric,

you know, and conventional war that we were talking about, Hezbollah is now seen as a component

of the war in Iran. It's still an ally of the Iran. Despite it being weak, and Iran is also

trying to fold his bullets to the bigger picture, and potentially a ceasefire plan.

I'm going to leave it right there. Nagar, Mordizabi, host of the Iran podcast. Thanks so much.

Coming up next, some fast food brands will begin listening in on drive-through interactions.

Learn why after the break.

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Next time you pull up to a fast food drive-through window, the employee ready to take your order

may not be the only one listening. The company that owns Burger King, Popeyes, and other big brands

is testing AI-powered headsets in some 500 restaurants. They'll include a voice-enabled chatbot

named Patty. And Patty will be tracking what employees say to customers. It'll note phrases like

welcome, and thank you to give managers what they call a friendliness score. But Patty's job

isn't just to spy on employees. The company says the chatbot will help workers remember recipes,

restock inventories, and alert managers if something is wrong. Patty brings up a lot of ethical

questions. So we called up Eufoma, a Junewap to serve up some answers. She's a professor at

Emory University and author of the Quantified Worker. Here's her conversation with Indira

Lakshman on. So first of all, we know that fast food workplaces are famous for being tightly

controlled. Workers have strict timelines they need to meet, scripts they're expected to recite,

so are AI headsets just a way to use new technology to modernize the age-old practice of employee

surveillance? Yes, this technology is not actually all that novel. In fact, we've seen this play out

in a lot of fast food places, companies like McDonald, etc., have used VRT sets to train workers

instead of using human managers, and that has had varying rates of success. So this is certainly

not new, and it certainly seems like yet another salvo in the use of AI technologies to

surveil and manage workers as part of like a boss wear. Is AI already being used to monitor

employees and other types of jobs? Of course. So a lot of times people think this might just be

relegated to certain industries, but it is widespread. Even white collar workers who might be using

computers, they usually have this computer's track, and they're also tracking like key strokes.

They're recording screenshots of what the worker is doing at any time. They are parsing emails

being sent from that computer. So there are all sorts of workers surveillance that is happening

in all sorts of industries. Now this restaurant group that owns Burger King in Popeyes says this

is meant to be a coaching tool, not a way to monitor individual workers, and they say that

patty is not designed to record conversations or evaluate individual employees. But the fact is

if this chatbot is always monitoring workers, does that distinction even matter? Exactly, and I think

that's really the crux of the issue. It's not really about the stated intention for the device,

or the AI technology. So companies might adopt certain AI technologies and present them as

benevolent or even benign, but we actually have to look at what the capability of that technology is,

because quite often once those technologies are adopted, there is a mission creep for those

technologies to do more things, including surveillance. Well, let me ask you other fast food chains,

including McDonald's, Wendy's, Taco Bell have experimented previously with AI primarily to

handle orders and drive through lanes. There were some funny high profile errors, like a customer

accidentally ordering 18,000 cups of water. But the idea was to reduce labor costs. So do you think

that chatbots like patty are paving the way to eventually replace human customer service workers?

Oh, for sure. For sure. I mean, you have to look at those chatbots already as automating the work

of managers, because as someone whose first job was in fast food, I could tell you that the managers

would listen in as you took orders, especially on the drive-through, and they would give you feedback.

So you have to see that this technology is actually already automating that managerial role.

And then you can imagine that all that data that is going to be collected could then be put to use

as training data, let's say, for the robots that will then replace the drive-through workers.

You said that you yourself once worked in fast food, and for a lot of teenagers,

the fast food industry is their entry place into the job market. So what do you think it would mean

for society if future workers are interacting with fewer human managers because those are being

replaced by AI? Right. So those are the ripple effects of AI technologies being adopted in the

workplace. So for teenagers, for a lot of young people, the fast food job is really a right of

passage. It's really the first taste of the responsibility, managing the personality of the

human manager, understanding expectations from a human manager. But now you're taking that away.

And so you wonder if those teenagers and if those young people are going to be able to develop the

skills necessary for when they move into jobs where they do have maybe more high stakes in how they

have to perform, and there's all these human personalities that they are not used to and need to

really reckon with. Yfoma Ajunwai is a law professor in the founding director of the AI and the

Future of Work program at Emory University. She's also the author of The Quantified Worker. Yfoma,

thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Coming up, Irish music is getting lots of love in Japan. Find out why after the break.

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ahead of St. Patrick's Day on Tuesday we want to take some time to appreciate the reach of Irish

music. It's become so popular it's spawned a growing music scene in a country about six thousand

miles away from Ireland. WVWR's Amelia Mason introduces us to an Irish music trio from Tokyo.

If you ask Kozo Toyota how he discovered Irish music, he gives a surprising answer.

Not so far from my house, there is a Tokyo Disney land.

As a kid, Toyota especially loved Disney's mock frontier town, Western land,

which featured an American soundtrack with banjo and fiddle.

Then one day, while he was browsing in a music shop, he found a CD by the Irish folk band

Dervish. Toyota was captivated. The music reminded him a little bit of the western soundtrack at

Disney, except it featured a flute. I used to play the trumpet and so I feel more familiar with

the wind instruments compared with the fiddle and the banjo. Toyota started teaching himself Irish

flute. At his university's Irish music club, he met accordion and bazooki player Hirofumi Nakamura

and at a gig, they met guitarist Koji Nagau. Together, they became Ojizo, a combination of their

names with an O apostrophe, like an Irish surname. Here's their version of the traditional Irish tune,

The Legacy Jig.

Ojizo has released three albums and toured internationally. Toyota says they've been well received,

though sometimes people are confused by a Celtic band from Japan.

Music. Our sound sounds of course Celtic, but they sometimes call Japanese Celtic music.

I'd like to say that I wasn't curious and fascinated and weirded out by the fact that there was

Irish music in Japan. At that time, though, I think that I was a little surprised.

Shannon Heaton is an Irish flute player from Boston. She thinks American reactions to Ojizo

have more to do with their assumptions about what Irish musicians look like. Her own perspective

has shifted a lot since befriending Celtic musicians in Japan and traveling there with her husband

to perform. Seeing the scene over there, it's kind of like how we build it over here. You get

into the music, you spend some time learning the tunes and making trips to Ireland. It's kind of

the same story as we have. In Japan, much like the state's interesting Celtic music surged in the

1990s thanks to cultural touchstones like Titanic and River Dance. Today, it's not uncommon to hear

traditional Irish tunes piped through the aisles of the popular Japanese retailer Mooji,

but for musicians, much of the music's appeal is social. Here's Shannon Heaton's husband,

guitarist Matt Heaton. When you go to sessions, you sit down with people that very likely you wouldn't

have come across any other way. It's such a cross-section of like the, what if it sounds like the

village people, the construction worker and the computer programmer and the, you know, the whatever,

the chef and the the freelancer and the, you know, this and that.

In Tokyo, it's the same story. Players of all levels get together and pubs to play tunes.

Toyota plays for a monthly Cayley dance. He says the Irish scene in Japan has grown since he

got into it 20 years ago. Especially among young students, Irish music and set dancing is so popular.

Ojizo has toured on the west coast and in the Midwest, but never made it to any of the country's

Irish strongholds until recently. They just wrapped up their first New England tour.

For here and now, I'm Amelia Mason.

Here and now, anytime comes from NPR and WBWAR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Sam

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