← Marketplace Morning Report
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- [00:00]
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McDonald's Commercial Voice
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Gideon Long
In India, a strike by gig workers threatens New Year's Eve deliveries Live from the UK this is the Marketplace Morning report from the BBC World Service. I'm Gideon Long. Good morning. Tens of thousands of app based gig workers in India are staging a nationwide strike that's likely to impact food delivery services on the final day of the year. They're demanding better wages, an improvement in safety conditions and better Social Security cover. The BBC's Ambarasan eti Rajan has more.
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Ambarasan Eti Rajan
There are an estimated 10 million delivery workers in India as part of the so called gig economy. The staff say they are crisscrossing long hours on the road in India's mega cities such as Delhi and Mumbai, and they should be given a minimum monthly salary and insurance. The strike has been timed to coincide with one of the busiest days of the year for delivery drivers New Year's Eve. Several social media content creators have urged people to boycott the apps for a day to support gig workers.
- [01:48]
Gideon Long
Amber Asan Etirajan reporting. Protesters in Bolivia have clashed with police over a government decision to scrap fuel subsidies under a new scheme. Gasoline prices have almost doubled. As the BBC's Klitsia Sala reports.
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Klitsia Sala
Police in the Bolivian capital La Paz dispersed the crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets as demonstrators set off small dynamite charges. They tried to break through the police cordon to reach the central square where many of Bolivia's government buildings are located. Protesters are opposed to the scrapping of a subsidy that had kept petrol and diesel prices frozen for more than 20 years.
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Gideon Long
Klitsia seller let's do the numbers. Chinese factory activity returned to slight growth this month after eight consecutive months of contraction. And India has extended duties on some imports of steel for three years to protect itself from cheap imports. The share prices of Indian steel producers rose on the news. A British company says it's a step closer to manufacturing materials in space. Space Forge says the crystals used in products like semiconductors would be much pur than those made on earth. Here's the BBC's Rebecca Morell.
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Rebecca Morell
The mini factory, which is about the size of a microwave, launched into space from California over the summer. While it's been orbiting around the Earth, the Space Forge team has been testing its systems from its mission control in Cardiff. The researchers have now demonstrated that they can turn on the furnace inside the space factory and it can reach about 1,000 degrees Celsius, the temperature needed to make semiconductors. The company says the weightless environment and lack of contaminants in the vacuum of space can create the purest semiconductor crystals. These would be used for communications, infrastructure, computing and transport.
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Gideon Long
Rebecca Morel as we come to the end of 2025, you're probably using more artificial intelligence than ever before. From a Google search to a post on social media, AI is creeping into our lives. But not everyone's convinced. The BBC's Will Chalk reports 2025 started.
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Will Chalk
With a bang for the AI industry.
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Rebecca Morell
Has the AI bubble burst? The world's biggest listed company, Nvidia, dumps.
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Klitsia Sala
Nearly $600 billion in January.
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Will Chalk
The emergence of a cheaper Chinese rival to ChatGPT, DeepSeek, caused chaos on the stock markets as US companies realized they weren't the only players in the game. But Deep Seek's dominance was short lived, partly because of its ties to China and censorship.
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Klitsia Sala
We asked it a couple of questions earlier on.
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Gideon Long
One was what happened in Tiananmen Square?
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Rebecca Morell
It gave us this answer.
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Klitsia Sala
I'm sorry, I can't answer that question.
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Will Chalk
Trust seemed to be the main concern Here is Ian Leslie, an author on human behaviour, speaking to us at the time.
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Ambarasan Eti Rajan
AI chatbots in general are amazing and it speaks, if that's the word, with complete confidence. But in some cases it's giving you completely mistaken information and presenting it as the truth.
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Will Chalk
Then there's the thorny issue of artificial intelligence and the arts which which has been in the spotlight more than ever, not least because of this.
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McDonald's Commercial Voice
It's the most powerful imagination engine ever built.
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Will Chalk
Sora 2, which can create eerily realistic looking videos of pretty much anything you can imagine at the click of a button and put you and your friends in them too, was released in September. It made so called AI slop easier to make than ever. But there were big concerns about copyright. Dr. Gary Marcus from New York University writes on AI. He told me it marked a fundamental shift for society.
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Dr. Gary Marcus
It leaves us in a society that's going to have trust issues because I think people are going to learn that you can't really trust video anymore. But we don't really have a replacement. We don't have a source of ground truth that people share, and I think that's going to be disruptive for society.
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Will Chalk
The big AI firms are still facing lawsuits from all around the world, largely from the people who own the copyright to the material their models are trained on. And it's playing out in a big way in the world of music, Because if you ask an AI generator to make you a song that sounds, say, like Ed Sheeran, some would argue that Ed Sheeran deserves some compensation. It's an issue that came to a head when big record labels, including Warner Bros. Sued the AI music app Suno. That is, until Warner Bros. Changed their mind and decided to work with them instead. Many in the music world were outraged, But some see it differently. Grammy nominated producer Jamie Rodigan told me there are others who see the app not as a threat, but as an opportunity.
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Jamie Rodigan
I enjoy using AI in the creative process. If I start writing a piece of music and need an idea or maybe some harmonies, I may upload a track to AI and AI throws me back some different variations or different examples of how the track could develop.
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Will Chalk
So it's polarizing, it's problematic, and it's fraught with risks. But if 2025 proved anything, it's that AI isn't going away.
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Gideon Long
Will Chalk reporting and in the UK I'm Gideon Long with the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. Happy New Year to you.
- [07:27]
Marima Reis
Hey everyone. You already listened to Marketplace podcasts, so you know that it's important to understand how economic forces shape our lives. And that feels especially important now as we're all trying to make sense of the latest headlines. I'm Marima Reis, host of Marketplaces this Is Uncomfortable, a show that explores how money bumps up against our relationships, our choices, and the parts of life we don't always say aloud. And starting January 15th, we are back every single week. New stories, new questions, and the kind of conversations that make you feel less alone in this quickly changing economy. We're tackling questions like should I turn my hobby into a money making side hustle? How do I deal with layoff anxiety? Or what do we owe our parents financially? Don't miss an episode. Subscribe to this is Uncomfortable from Marketplace. Wherever you get your podcasts.