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

0:00Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. It'd be interesting to see what country wouldn't 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 Hormuz.

0:45It's Monday, March 16th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBOR Boston. I'm Shiko Theuri.

0:55Today on the show, AI is coming to a fast food joint near you. Hundreds of restaurants are outfitting drive-thru 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.

1:31But 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 has also cut off ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, 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.

2:11reopen the Strait of Hormuz by sending warships there. The U.S. is also focusing its air campaign on Karg 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 Hormuz. 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.

2:55They're just not letting passage to any ships that are in any way related to the other side or the enemy. They have strategic control over the straits. 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 Iranian soil. They also have speedboats that can be in the water. So I'm not very sure if there's actual planning on how to be reacting to this Iranian strategic control of that.

3:36And that's probably part of the reason why there isn't much interest 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 Karg Island oil depot. The U.S. bombed military targets on the island over the weekend, spared its oil facilities.

4:14How important is that island there in the northern part of the Persian Gulf? How strategic is it both to the U.S. and Iran? It's very important to Iran. This is a small island that has one of the most important oil facilities of Iran. It's one of the pillars of the Iranian economy, and it's also very 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 target oil facilities in the region, starting with wherever the U.S. has interests, which we can know as many. And so I think we should take Iranians seriously as far as threats, because whatever we've seen in the different stages that they've taken, that they had been threatening before the war started and then after the war started, they've actually made good.

5:03The 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 U.S. targets, for U.S. service members, which right now are almost out of harm's way from Iran. The carrier is just so far away from Iranian soil and the reach of Iranian missiles that they haven't been able to inflict too many casualties on the U.S. side. But imagine if you bring so many troops essentially into Iranian soil 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 U.S.

5:40Marines 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 heart island. Now, I don't know how serious these are because, again, I think one of the problems on the U.S. side is that there doesn't seem to be a coherent planning for this war. But the suggestion, or at least how the Iranian side understands this, is that if U.S. forces get any closer to Iran, they would also potentially be in the reach of these Iranian missiles, which they aren't right now.

6:19And so that would also essentially bring this to the next level for the Iranian side as far as inflicting pain to the U.S. 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 time and again using as much force as possible to try to basically remove that threat from their border.

7:02And it just hasn't seemed 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, But Hezbollah is now seen as a component of the war in Iran. It's still an ally of Iran, despite it being weak. And Iran is also trying to fold Hezbollah into the bigger picture of potentially a ceasefire plan. I'm going to leave it right there.

7:37Nagar Mordhazavi, host of the Iran podcast. Thanks so much.

7:43Coming up next, some fast food brands will begin listening in on drive-thru interactions. Learn why after the break.

8:23than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50 % at selectquote.com slash anytime. That's selectquote.com slash anytime. Next time you pull up to a fast food drive-thru 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.

9:04But 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 Ifoma Ojunwa to serve up some answers. She's a professor at Emory University and author of The Quantified Worker. Here's her conversation with Indira Lakshmanan. 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?

9:46Yes, this technology is not actually all that novel. In fact, you know, We've seen this play out in a lot of fast food places. Companies like McDonald's, et cetera, have used VR 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 boss wear. Is AI already being used to monitor employees in 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.

10:29Even white-collar workers who might be using computers, they usually have those computers tracked. And they are also tracking keystrokes. They are 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 worker surveillance that is happening in all sorts of industries. Now, this restaurant group that owns Burger King and 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?

11:14Exactly. 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.

11:55There 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-thru, and they would give you feedback. So you have to see that this technology is actually already automating that managerial role.

12:40And 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, right, that will then replace the drive-thru 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, right, of AI technologies being adopted in the workplace. So for teenagers, for a lot of young people, you know, the fast food job is really a rite of passage.

13:27It's really their 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. Ifoma Ajunwa is a law professor and the founding director of the AI and the Future of Work program at Emory University.

14:05She's also the author of The Quantified Worker. Ifoma, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

14:21coming up Irish music is getting lots of love in Japan find out why after the break

14:38Ahead 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 spawned a growing music scene in a country about 6 ,000 miles away from Ireland. WBUR'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 Tokyo Disneyland. As a kid, Toyota especially loved Disney's mock frontier town, Westernland, which featured an Americana soundtrack with banjo and fiddle.

15:21Then one day, while he was browsing in a music shop, he found a CD by the Irish folk band dervish.

15:36Toyota 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 a wind instrument compared with the fiddle and the banjo. Toyota started teaching himself Irish flute. At his university's Irish music club, he met accordion and bouzouki player Hirofumi Nakamura, and at a gig, they met guitarist Koji Nagao. Together, they became O-Jizo, 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.

16:26Ojizo has released three albums and toured internationally. Toyoda says they've been well-received, though sometimes people are confused by a Celtic band from Japan. Some of the audiences ask us what kind of 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.

17:15Her 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 States, interest in Celtic music surged in the 1990s thanks to cultural touchstones like Titanic and Riverdance. Today, it's not uncommon to hear traditional Irish tunes piped through the aisles of the popular Japanese retailer Muji. But for musicians, much of the music's appeal is social.

17:52Here'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 sounds like the village people, the construction worker and the computer programmer and the, you know, the whatever, the chef and the freelancer and the, you know, this and that.

18:25In Tokyo, it's the same story. Players of all levels get together in pubs to play tunes. Toyota plays for a monthly Kaylee dance. He says the Irish scene in Japan has grown since he got into it 20 years ago.

18:48Ojizo 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.

19:11Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBOR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Sam Rafelson and Will Wacke. Today's editors were Micaela Rodriguez, Michael Scotto, and me, Chico Theuri. Technical direction from Caleb Green and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin, and the executive producer of Here and Now is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.