Loading...
Loading...

Support for here and now comes from the VCU School of Business.
Curious about grad school but not ready to apply? VCU offers a low commitment way to look closer
through informational webinars and events. Details at business.vcu.edu slash info sessions.
WBUR podcasts. Boston.
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.
Support for here and now any time comes from Select Quote. If you're new to life insurance,
you're not alone. Thankfully, there's Select Quote. For over 40 years, Select Quote has helped
more than 2 million Americans understand their options and get the coverage they need. Select Quote
takes the guesswork out of finding the right life insurance policy. Life insurance is never
cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you, for less, and save more than 50%
at Select Quote.com slash anytime. That's Select Quote.com slash anytime.
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.
This message comes from Midi Health, a virtual care platform for women in
para-menopause and menopause. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Kathleen Jordan shares the wide range
of symptoms they work to address for women in midlife. There's dry eyes, dry hair, dry skin,
there's dry mouth, trouble sleeping, panic and anxiety attacks. When we ask patients about
common symptoms, on average they report six. Midi Health, committed to helping women in midlife
with para-menopause and menopause care. Accessible via telehealth visits. adjoin-m-i-d-i.com
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
Raifelsen and Will Walkie. Today's editors were Mikaela Rodriguez, Michael Scato and me, Shiko Theuri,
technical direction from Caleb Green and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mika Scato, Max Liebman
and Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Allison Hagen and Gray Skryphon and the executive
producer up here and now is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.
Visit bombas.com slash NPR and use code NPR for 20% off your first purchase.
This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills,
bogus fees and free perks, Mint Mobile might be right for you with plans starting from 15 bucks a
month. Shop plans today at mintmobile.com slash switch, upfront payment of $45 for three
month five gigabyte plan required, new customer offer for first three months only, then full price
plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.
This message comes from NPR sponsor OnePassword. Anyone else feel like 99% of your emails and
texts are password reset codes? Trusted by millions of users and over 175,000 businesses.
OnePassword lets you skip the resets and sign in securely with strong, unique passwords that
auto fill across all your devices. You can safely share logins, store cards and files,
and finally, stop using your pet's name as a password. Try it free for two weeks at onepassword.com
slash NPR.
Here & Now Anytime



