Are we entering a world without screens?

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0:30while you drive home the Honda you've been waiting for. Honda Downtown Chicago. Right price, right now. Could ending the war in Lebanon hold the key for a deal between the United States and Iran? I'm Tristan Redman. And I'm Asma Khaled. And together we host the Global Story Podcast from the BBC. Talks to end the war have stalled, with Iran's insistence on an end to the war in Lebanon a sticking point. Why is the war in Lebanon so hard to stop? For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your pods.

1:29on something that's fake, I think it really matters. Hello and welcome to The Interface, the show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Thomas Germain. I'm Nikki Wolfe. Unfortunately, the lovely Karen Howell can't join us today. She's a busy woman, but instead we have our very first guest, a senior reporter at MSNOW, the brilliant Brandi Cedrosny. Brandi will be taking us inside the hidden clipping industry where politicians can now pay armies of people to flood your feed with content. We'll also be looking at how the tech industry is thinking about a world without screens.

2:05And why pollsters are asking robots what they think instead of people.

2:13So first off, welcome to Brandy. Brandy, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Exciting to have you on the show. So what are we talking about? Well, before we get started, we should mention really quickly that Google's big conference, Google I.O., is today. We're recording before it happens. So if you're listening in the future, there's probably a bunch of earth-shattering tech news that we're not going to be talking about, but we'll get to that next week. But in the meantime, I want to talk about some news that leaked a couple of weeks ago at Bloomberg. It's a story from the reporter Mark Gurman about how Apple is apparently, reportedly, in the late stages of testing AirPods with cameras in them.

2:59This is a rumor, but it's, you know, a pretty compelling rumor. This guy, this reporter, usually knows what Apple is up to before they announce it. We reached out to Apple. We'll let you know in the show notes if they get back to us. But this is really interesting. So the idea here is these cameras, apparently, they're not for taking pictures, right? They're going to be providing low-resolution images. And the idea is that they'll work with AI. So you'll be walking around and Siri will be able to see the world along with you. and you'll be able to answer questions and like get directions or like what is this plant that I'm looking at or whatever it is.

3:39And the really interesting thing here is this is part of a much bigger trend that we've seen over the past couple of years where people within the tech industry are talking about pushing us towards a world where we're interacting less with screens and more using computers with our voices, right? You know, everybody's talking about like the meta Ray-Bans glasses that have the cameras in them. You guys know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah, the creepy, creepy, creepy ones. You know, some people are really alarmed by them. Some people really love them. I mean, they're selling like crazy. They keep every year, they're selling more of them.

4:12The tech is shrinking. We hear a lot about like AR, augmented reality and virtual reality, right? Where like you might have a screen like within the glasses themselves, like the newest metaglasses do that. But I think the really interesting thing here is AI provides an opportunity that wasn't possible before. where your phone or your device or whatever just can be more descriptive and you can talk to it like it's a guy. And it opens up a whole new possible way to use machines that wasn't an option before. And I think the interesting question here is like, do we think that this is something that people want?

4:53Like, is it possible? Will the tech industry be able to push us in this direction? And if so, like, what would that world be like? So we're talking about the end of screens. No, the other way to ask that question is like, one, who asked for this? And two, like, what are the unintended consequences, right? Like, that's what I always think. What harm will this hath wrought in a couple of months after its release? And like with metaglasses, I just saw somebody, I was going for my morning run and, you know, I asked the park department guy, I was like, when are we turning on the water fountains? And he had on the metaglasses.

5:24And I think like in the real world, it's so jarring. Even for me, who's like, should be like, I'm technically a tech reporter. I should be used to this. And I hate it so much. I just think that there's so much backlash. Like I'm immediately thinking like they say, okay, you're only taking pictures. But like what in the Pokemon Go are these pictures going to be used for? Right? Like what location date? Like what are they stealing from me? And, you know, what evil will it come out to? Yeah, especially when you mix it with facial recognition technology and that kind of thing. So quick question. this particular gizmo is earpods with cameras?

5:59Do we know anything about what they look like? Where are the cameras coming out and pointing forwards? Do we know anything about that? We haven't seen them, but what the reporting says is, you know, they look like traditional earpods, and apparently there's like the stem is a little bigger, and there's a camera at the end here, so you're walking around, and it can see what you're seeing, and this would allow the AI to understand the environment that you're in and you could interact with it more than if you're just talking to it. So you can already talk to ChatGPT and Google Gemini. They have like a voice feature, right?

6:40And you can walk around with them on your headphones and have a conversation with it all day if that's what you want to do. God bless you. This would be a deeper level, right? because being able to just point your head at something and ask about it would unlock new options for ways that you can interface with your computer. I see what you did the... I love talking to my phone. I don't ever type out text anymore. I always do voice notes or I just do voice to text. I'm the same way. It's such a waste of time. It's crazy. Yeah, when I'm sitting there with my thumbs like a caveman, No, no, I'm done with that.

7:20I think you guys raise a really interesting point about the cameras, right? This freaks people out. I've had this experience like going up to someone and they like turn to look at me and there's like little cameras on their face. It's kind of creepy. I think that's part of what's interesting about Apple doing this. And also we don't, we should stress, we don't know for sure that they're doing it. I mean, the fact that this reporting came out, it's pretty compelling. I think it's likely that they're testing it. And we know that Apple has been moving in this direction, right? They put out those giant, you know, goggles, the Apple Vision Pro a couple of years ago.

7:50So this is technology that they're thinking about. Apple, right, it's got its whole reputation for privacy. They certainly wouldn't want to put out a product that freaked everyone out about how Apple is now invading your personal space by filming you all the time. So I don't know what they would do, but you could imagine it being like, well, this thing never records, right? It's like ambiently taking images. It's processed on the device. We're not keeping any of the data. I'm spitballing here. I'm not saying that that would assuage all the privacy concerns. But, you know, if we could set aside the privacy stuff, it is interesting the possibilities that this would unlock.

8:32Because like, if you think about the history of technology, right, you know, there's this old saying the medium is the message, right? So the latest technology like dictates how we interact with the world, right? When cable became a thing, There were more opportunities for more cable channels. TV got a lot more specific and weird. Then when the internet became widely available, everyone started reading blogs. We switched to cell phones. Social media apps became a thing. Then everyone got a much faster internet connection on their phone. And now we can do short form video. And that's like the latest thing.

9:05If it was possible to just talk to your phone and like have a really rich experience interacting with the world, that could unlock whole new kinds of like, not just like material and content, but like ways of being like you could be on your computer all the time in a way that didn't feel like you were like looking at this little prescribed rectangle that's giving you a very specific experience that's not in your control. It could be really cool. But I don't know, does anybody want that? It sounds like the end of reading. The end of reading. That doesn't sound good. But we might already be past that point.

9:45I mostly read books in audiobook form. So yeah, I have books spoken to me much more than I read them on paper. And also people are interacting. The content people are getting from their phones right now is much more of the short-form video content. I mean, it's only kind of really dinosaurs and journalists and dinosaur journalists who are still on purely text-based social media, like Twitter and Blue Sky, by miles, are much smaller ones and skew older than stuff like TikTok. I mean, all the progression of technology really has been pushing us towards stuff where you're looking at a thing. Is it just contrary to human nature and the way that we interact with the world that we want to be looking at something?

10:33Because that's our primary sense. For the most part, I don't know. Like this might be an entirely foregone conclusion. Or it could be like a thing you have on top of your normal experience with your phone that like you interact with it less because now it's easier to just talk. But I don't know, does this, would you guys use a thing like this if it was available? It sounds cool. Yeah, no, it sounds really great. I do like a lot of outdoor activities. I do a lot of hiking and a lot of running. And so it's like, and I'm constantly like annoyed that I have to look at my phone for things. I'm sure it's something terrible will happen because of it.

11:05It'll be horrible and bad. Yeah, of course. Everything's horrible. And I think like what you said, I'm kind of obsessed with this idea of like what we're doing now is bad for us. Screens are bad for us. That's like the du jour bad for you thing. But like, you know, in the if you look at historical newspapers, they're, you know, columnists bemoaning all of the delinquent children playing chess and reading in bed and things like it's just it's what we do is sort of feed ourselves over the things that we find enjoyable. but I do think that no screens would mean less screens and I think that'd be good.

11:38The reason I'm skeptical about this is just how much of a seismic shift going away from screens would be. I mean, there is so much industry investment in screen content from the short-form video companies themselves. You know, TikTok is not going to love a move away from screens. That's a kind of shot across the bowels to all visual social media. The television and, you know, video industry, the video game industry will talk about second screen content. You get things that are marketed specifically as second screen games, TV that's designed to be watched with kind of half your brain. Like it would require, it's hard to overstate how much of a revolution a screenless world would be.

12:27and there have been attempts at this in the recent past like there have been a couple of ai products you guys remember there's this thing called the rabbit which was like a little it looked like a game boy almost oh i was wondering why you were going with that i was like this is the wrong podcast yeah no no uh it was a very wholesome device and it was like a little ai that you'd carry around and it did have a screen but like the primary way you'd interact with it was through speech or there was this thing called the humane pin that was this huge flop where it was like a thing you would pin it to your chest and you would talk to it mostly.

13:00And then it had like a little projector where you would hold up your hand and it would like project something. It was really weird. Total flop. People didn't like it. Maybe the tech just wasn't ready, but it didn't work. Also, Apple is a company that makes screens, right? Maybe the primary impetus between us, Greenwald. Yeah. But there's also, I don't know if you guys saw, there's this survey the other day and it showed that like people were scrolling less. I'm scrolling less personally. And I think that like people in my lives are scrolling. There's just, I'm not, I've seen the content. I know what it is.

13:34Like I'm bored. I think people may be bored. Apple doesn't want you to stop buying iPhones or MacBooks or, you know, we could list a whole bunch of products they have that have a screen on them. But I think it could be one of two things. Maybe it's just like, well, this is another thing you have. It doesn't replace your screen. You're still going to need it, right? You're still going to need to read documents. You're still going to be, you want to look at pictures. You want to take pictures. You want to, you know, watch videos and stuff. But maybe it would open up an additional, maybe the way that this could go wrong is we're on our devices more because now you don't have to be holding them.

14:12Or maybe, you know, it would replace some of that activity. But also it could just be, it seems like a lot of, you know, the leaders in the tech industry just seem to think that this is where things are going and they're trying to preempt it and build that feature before other people get there. It would just be nice to be able to talk to Siri the way that we all thought we would be able to when the device, when the feature was announced, right? And I could imagine this being super useful and maybe you won't be so addicted to Instagram. That'd be nice. and it's worth saying that this is already a revolution that's happened in terms of the home you know i know lots of people with an alexa lots of people with with a siri device in their house you tell it switch the lights off you tell it to turn on the alarm you tell it to order toilet paper that's already a shift that's happened so maybe this is a sort of personal carry around one of those but i was just going to say the opposite of that because i have an alexa and one-tenth of my conversations are like, no, Alexa.

15:18It's a really frustrating experience as a consumer. Yeah. But I think the idea here is that it would get smarter and it would be because it can see now they talk about technology being more embodied, right? That it like is more present in the world than it has been in the past because it can see you're walking around with it. It becomes like more like a guy who's there with you. It's like your Iron Man suit. It's like your Iron Man suit. Yeah, exactly. One way or another, it's going to start making its way into our world. Maybe it'll be something you wear on your face like glasses or headphones.

15:56Maybe it'll be something else. But it is, I think, a little preview, if not of where things are going, then of where the tech industry is going to try and take us and the experiences that you're going to be having with your devices in the near future. Yeah, expect wearable tech to be the thing that people are trying to sell you quite a lot in the near future. Yeah, yeah. Do you want it? I don't know, but it's coming. Put in the comments if you would wear AirPods with cameras on them, even if they're looking forward or if they're looking directly up your ear into your brain. Let us know in the comments.

16:32Yeah, that I would like. I got to figure out what's going on in there.

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17:16That's Thrive Cosmetics, C-A-U-S-E-M-E-T-I-C-S dot com slash shine26. Could ending the war in Lebanon hold the key for a deal between the United States and Iran? I'm Tristan Redman. And I'm Asma Khaled. And together we host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. Talks to end the war have stalled, with Iran's insistence on an end to the war in Lebanon a sticking point. Why is the war in Lebanon so hard to stop? For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your pods.

17:55So up next, Brandy's got a really great story for us here. And I'm really excited about it because in part it's, you know, kind of the other side of something we've been talking about for a while. So a couple of weeks ago, we did a story about how this band Geese got incredibly popular. And it turned out that part of the way that that happened was the record label was paying for people to post clips of the band and act like they were just kind of naturally really excited about it. And people believe there was this organic conversation. Or more recently, we had a piece about how the AI industry was paying influencers to talk about how Chinese AI companies are scary and American AI companies are good.

18:38But this is sort of the other side of it, where instead of like tech entering the world of politics, now politics is going into tech and doing the same thing that we've been discussing. And this is kind of your beat, right? like the way that people use social media to make the public believe things, right? Yeah, I think my beat generally is a combination of people, platforms, and politics. And so how people use social media to really organize, because political movement online is real, right? Like there is a real way. That's a great, one of the great things about social media is that small marginalized groups can actually get together and make a big noise and get political power.

19:24But in these cases, I often like to see how campaigns are using the platforms. And we've seen, you know, from Obama using social media for the first time. And then in 2016, the way Trump really took over Facebook ads and just threw money into social media ads like that. And then also, you know, made the way for this organic movement of, you know, deplorables to come up, the all right to come up online with him. That was original. And now we're seeing what I think is interesting in terms of AI usage, which I know you guys have talked about before in political campaigns, but also this idea that we've seen in entertainment, that clipping, the clipping industry, how they're sort of using social media to make it look like certain candidates have this huge following or lots of interest where people are seeing their content and then serving it up in a different way to their communities or their online friends.

20:21And so what is Clipping? Really, it's a gig economy industry where you can go online as a gig worker and you can sign up for campaigns for lots of things. There was a big campaign around Justin Bieber and Coachella. It's mostly for entertainment, but now you can go on and you can sign up for a campaign And you get paid basically a dollar or two dollars generally per 1 ,000 views to take one of the videos or podcast appearances or ads and clip about 40 seconds of it. Edit it, clip it, and post it on your own social media. And then you basically turn in your receipts and say, I got this many views, and you get a small payment.

21:00It's a pretty small community, actually. I've been joining a couple of these groups. Interesting. Most people aren't making their main income this way. It's not really a get rich quick sort of scheme, but you can sign up, make a few dollars, side gig, side hustle. I'm just so interested in the fact that you embedded into these clipping communities. Can you tell us more about what that's like? Like, what are the conversations happening in there? What are the people like? Where's my money? So they're just like me. It's their hustlers. It's people just, you know, trying to make a buck. And so it's, you know, you go into Discord or you go into, I think it's WHOP or WAP.

21:42I'm not sure. But the WHOP, I think it is. Okay. You basically just say, you know, I want to be a part of this community. And you go in and then there are active campaigns that you can sort of scroll through and see what you're interested in. And then, you know, you click on a document, you get the rules for that campaign, and it tells you exactly what to do and where to do it. And then the communities themselves, the chats are really just, you know, why isn't this working for me? Where is my money? I submitted my clip. And then people talking about either what's wrong with it or what's working, sharing tips.

22:18Like one of the tips I saw yesterday was, you know, some people just clip and put it up. But the ones that really move seem to be the clips that are around 40 seconds. So the shorter ones, no, you need that, like, people to engagement time. And then also the ones that have just a teeny piece of additive content. So if you just clip and post, it's boring. So sort of tips and tricks, gig economy stuff. So yeah, I've been recently seeing a lot of Spencer Pratt ads. I'm in New York. Spencer Pratt is a former reality villain, bad boy of the hills. Now he is running for mayor because this is the world that we live in.

23:02And he's doing really, I'm sorry, mayor of L.A. And he's running for mayor of L.A. And he's doing really well in the polls. And it's hard to say, right, like whether what why he's doing well in the polls. Like partly it's because L.A. is weird and he's got a lot of weird rich friends that are giving him money. Partly. And it's because I think of this clipping campaign that he's got going because I'm seeing these clips of him everywhere. Right. These these clips. of Spencer at the debate, you know, owning Karen Bass, the current mayor. I'm seeing these ads where he is Batman, these AI ads. I'm seeing him on Joe Rogan.

23:38Like, and I have a really carefully curated algorithm. There's no reason I should be seeing all of these Spencer Pratt clips, but I am. And so I joined a couple of these clipping communities and went to check out the Spencer campaign. And so he's running a couple of clipping campaigns right now. Like one of them, his budget is$10 ,500. And basically when you think about bang for your buck, right? Like how much does a billboard cost and how many people see it? Well, if you have a$10 ,500 clipping campaign and you're paying$2 per thousand views, I'm not a mathematician because I'm a journalist, but you can get a ton of views for not that much money.

24:20And so I think it's a really, really smart way of doing it. And like, also, you know, we should talk about disclosure with Spencer Pratt's campaign. Cause I think that this is sort of the wave of politicians are always a little late to the internet, but when they do pick it up, like boy, howdy. And so I think we're going to see a lot of it in the midterms and you're going to see something on Spencer Pratt's ads that you don't see other places. So when you do look at these Spencer Pratt clipping campaigns, you'll see on the clips way down below sometimes, you'll see a disclosure from and it says this ad was paid by the Spencer Pratt campaign.

24:57And that is special. And it's only because California has a law that requires that disclosure. So we have, you know, two agencies that should be regulating this sort of thing, and it falls right in between them. So one is the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission would, if they're selling a product or, you know, supporting a consumer group or something, they have to, an influencer has to disclose that. The other is the FEC, the Federal Election Commission. And if this were a television ad or a radio ad, they would have to disclose it. But because it falls somewhere in between, nobody's regulating it, even though industry groups have begged the FEC to do something, nobody's doing it.