Is tech ruining the World Cup?

Summary

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The Interface (BBC)

Episode: Is tech ruining the World Cup?

Date: June 25, 2026
Hosts: Thomas Germain, Karen Ho, Nicky Wolfe

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Episode Overview

In the season one finale of The Interface, hosts Thomas, Karen, and Nicky dive deep into how technological innovation—especially AI and surveillance—has transformed the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The team then pivots to broader questions about AI's march into the workplace, discussing the “infinite work week” and the rise of gig work. The episode is full of sharp debate, humor, and reflection, including memorable quotes and a spirited season wrap-up.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Tech at the World Cup: On and Off the Pitch

Robot Dogs & Drone Warfare

• Stadium Security: Security measures now include robot dogs (a la Boston Dynamics) for crowd control and drone-on-drone countermeasures to prevent attacks and piracy.
  • Nicky Wolfe [04:27]: “Robot dogs. You may have seen these from... They look a lot like dogs. They're really evil looking things.”
• Anti-Drone Tech: Drones attempting to broadcast games illicitly are targeted with radio-jamming guns and net-equipped intercepting drones.
  • Nicky Wolfe [05:17]: “So they block the radio signals. They send out a radio wave that jams.”
  • Karen Ho [05:54]: “Out of the stadium like a drone stork delivering a baby.”

Hyper-Quantified Play

• Smart Balls: Each match ball is embedded with a chip, precisely tracking its position, aiming to resolve disputed goals (like the infamous “goal that never was”).
  • Nicky Wolfe [06:52]: “There’s these little edge cases... you could see on all of the TV action replays that ball crossed the goal line.”
• 3D Modeling of Players: Every player is scanned, and AI models track body parts with astonishing detail (even armpits and toes) to enforce offside calls and boundary decisions.
  • Karen Ho [07:13]: “They are literally 3D modeling the crevice of their armpits.”
  • Nicky Wolfe [07:34]: “...measuring where the players are at all times.”

Hydration Tech & Ad Breaks

• Wearables: Players wear bands to monitor hydration, with “hydration breaks,” though these double as new slots for TV ads.
  • Nicky Wolfe [09:33]: “There’s also this quite controversial thing where the game has hydration breaks now... really it’s to put two more advertising breaks. Congratulations, American capitalism.”

2. Is Technology Making Football Better?

Trust and Enjoyment

• Nicky identifies a tension: accuracy is higher, but something human is lost.
  • Nicky Wolfe [10:45]: “There was this kind of sportsmanlike thing... There was this kind of humanity to it. If someone is offside by their fingertips... it makes it a little bit colder, a little bit more computerized.”
• Concerns that over-quantification “dehumanizes” players and viewers.
  • Karen Ho [13:18]: “...there’s this irony that sporting events are themselves a celebration of human feats... And now they’re trying to overly quantify every little thing...”

AI Outages — Not Infallible

• Tech failures can cause major controversy, as with a Switzerland/Qatar match where the 3D offside system broke.
  • Nicky Wolfe [15:05]: “The 3D system stopped working... and a lot of people think the penalty should not have been awarded.”

The Fate of the Human Referee

• Both practical and symbolic questions arise about whether human refs are needed at all.
  • Thomas Germain [11:52]: “Presumably you don't need a ref at all if every single thing that's happening on the field can be monitored down to the toes.”

Referee Body-Cams and Empathy

• Body-cams allow viewers to see from the referee’s POV, marketed as empathy-building rather than surveillance.
  • Karen Ho [16:53]: “...they have referee body cams that are now showing viewers... the game through the perspective of a referee.”

3. The “Infinite Work Week”: AI in the Real World

AI Agents and Nonstop Work

• AI is not reducing workload; instead, it's inducing “infinite” work with employees “babysitting” AI agents around the clock.
  • Thomas Germain [22:34]: “...they’re spending all their time sitting there monitoring these AI tools, and work is bleeding into other parts of their life.”
• Workers (especially developers) report “AI-induced exhaustion” from constant multitasking.
  • Karen Ho [23:27]: “Headaches, slower decision making, trouble focusing... both because of their work and also babysitting AI agents.”

AI Fallibility and Trust

• AI assistants in critical tasks remain unreliable, e.g. “getting it wrong 4 out of 10 times” in medical diagnoses.
  • Nicky Wolfe [23:54]: “Doctors are having to spend all of this time checking that homework as well.”

AI as a Gig Work Accelerator

• Companies like Klarna replace employees with gig workers “monitoring” AI systems, not with direct employment but Uber-style temp work.
  • Thomas Germain [26:55]: “Now you can get a job... temporarily going in to assist the AI.”
• Loss of benefits, labor rights, and bargaining power noted as a major trend.
  • Nicky Wolfe [27:18]: “No benefits, not the employment rights. No benefits, no health insurance.”

Rising Gig Economy

• 39% of US workers are gig/freelance; that may rise to 50% soon.
  • Thomas Germain [28:31]: “...that number is expected to rise to about half of the American workforce in the next year.”

Agency and Pushback

• Some workers are organizing, striking, and resisting AI-driven degradation of work.
  • Karen Ho [30:28]: “There are many different examples now of ways that workers are coming together, unionizing, or engaging in other forms of protest...”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the roboticization of football:
  • Karen Ho [13:18]: “...the World Cup is a microcosm of how society is treating technology at large... There is this overwhelming sense... that every nook and cranny of society needs to be shoved with tech.”
• On losing the human touch:
  • Nicky Wolfe [16:12]: “If something is just completely being automated and something as, as human as sport, it’s less fun. Right.”
• On modern “ref hate” vs. “AI hate”:
  • Nicky Wolfe [16:36]: “Hating on the ref is a football tradition... Hating on the AI just doesn’t, just hits differently.”
• On the flattening nature of gig work:
  • Thomas Germain [27:25]: “It becomes easier to just plug people in like a cog in the machine.”
• On nostalgia for ‘old’ digital work:
  • Thomas Germain [24:51]: “There was this really great line... that someday we may look back nostalgically on the time when we got to make PowerPoint presentations by hand.”

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Important Timestamps

• World Cup tech deep dive: [03:32 – 13:18]
• Tech reliance and controversy in football: [13:18 – 17:37]
• Infinite work week & gig economy segment: [20:01 – 30:28]
• Labor and pushback against AI at work: [30:28 – 31:30]
• Season one highlights/wrap-up: [32:08 – 36:25]
• Listener questions (used books, AI training): [38:30 – 40:00]

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Season One Reflections (& Lighter Moments)

• Funniest episode highlights:
  • Tom tricked Google's AI into listing him as the hotdog-eating champion of tech journalism [32:47].
  • Karen’s devotion to free airline headphones, despite protests from her co-hosts [33:48].
• Listener engagement:
  • Shoutouts to listeners globally, reflections on feedback about speech patterns (like overuse of "like") [37:08, 37:22].
  • Fascinating listener question about AI firms bulk-buying used books for training, involving “machine slicing of spines” [39:45].
• Biggest laugh lines:
  • Thomas Germain: “If you’re in the World Cup, they'll know exactly where your thumb is.” [29:38]
  • Nicky Wolfe: “I think without question the greatest story we've done ... is Microsoft Outlook in Space where ... they couldn't get their emails. They're astronauts. They're just like us.” [36:16]

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Episode Tone

Fast-paced, witty, fiercely informed but irreverent. Hosts blend critical skepticism about techno-solutionism with humor and a recognition of the human stakes—whether on the soccer pitch, in digital workplaces, or in listener inboxes.

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Summary

The Interface ends its first season probing the paradox at the heart of modern tech: it promises fairness, precision, and convenience—from football pitches to workplace desks—but sometimes at the cost of warmth, agency, and, ironically, meaningful improvement. The 2026 World Cup exemplifies this trade-off, as does the changing nature of work in the AI age. With listener stories, sharp banter, and a healthy dose of gratitude, the team closes the season with more questions than answers—and a promise to return after summer, more “interfacey” than ever.

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Transcript

[Advertisement Voice]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Like those $5 roses at a gas station? Or a secondhand piece of technology that breaks in the first 10 minutes? Marketers know that feeling. We optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions reach and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not so great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for bullspend. Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest roas of all major ad networks. You'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title and more. So cut the bull. Spend. Advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a 250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com broadcast that's LinkedIn.com broadcast. Terms and conditions apply.

[Karen Ho]

There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. Stand still. Not a chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now we're here to help you keep going Further. Capella University what can't you do? Visit Capella Edu to More.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Not just does a computer know where the ball is at all times, it is also down to their fingertips measuring where the players are at all times.

[Karen Ho]

They are literally 3D modeling the crevice of their armpits.

[Thomas Germain]

Hello and welcome to the Interface, the show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week and your world. Hi, I'm Thomas Germain.

[Karen Ho]

I'm Karen Ho.

[Nicky Wolfe]

And I'm Nicky Wolfe.

[Thomas Germain]

This week on the Interface, we'll be talking about whether AI is taking us careening towards an infinite work week.

[Nicky Wolfe]

And this year's World cup is the most technologically advanced ever. But is it making the game better?

[Karen Ho]

So, guys, this is episode 20.

[Thomas Germain]

Nice. Long time. Can you believe it? We're gonna be taking a brief summer break, but the show will be back in September. More interfacey than ever.

[Karen Ho]

Indeed. So it is the final episode of season one, and we wanted to take the opportunity as part of this episode to reminisce a little bit. We've also received so many wonderful emails from listeners over the last 20 weeks. So at the end of our episode, we will be dipping into some of those as well.

[Nicky Wolfe]

And before we before we dive into the football of a quick update for you guys, which is that over the last few days, SpaceX has lost a trillion dollars in value. So I'm afraid we are going to have to give back $200 to every mouse on the planet. Apologies to all the mice out there.

[Thomas Germain]

It lost a trillion dollars in value.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah.

[Thomas Germain]

Wow.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah, yeah.

[Thomas Germain]

We talked last week about how with all the money that SpaceX has made since it went public, you could afford to give every mouse $200. But now that's, that's no longer the case.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah, sorry, mice.

[Karen Ho]

No more universal mice income.

[Nicky Wolfe]

But the mice can watch the football. So should we dive into that?

[Karen Ho]

You mean soccer?

[Thomas Germain]

Also known as soccer.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Also known as soccer for Americans.

[Thomas Germain]

I know this is the BBC, but

[Nicky Wolfe]

just to be clear, Football association football or soccer, it is the World Cup. Right now, as the, as this podcast resident sporty person, which I do not know how that's come about, I want to talk about some of the technology that's been used. Some of it. For the very first time in this

[Thomas Germain]

World Cup, I do feel like I heard about some kind of World Cup. Yeah, that's familiar.

[Nicky Wolfe]

For listeners who may not be aware, the World cup is the largest sporting event ever, it's ever on the planet. So there's a lot of really cool tech going on in this World Cup. Some of it's going on outside the pitch. You have drone on drone warfare. Because first of all, these kind of things are always vulnerable to things like terrorist attacks. You also have a lot of crowd control. So you have these robot dogs at some stadiums helping with crowd control.

[Thomas Germain]

Robot dogs.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Robot dogs. You may have seen these from. There was a Black Mirror episode which featured these. These are the, like Boston Dynamics. They look a lot like dogs. They're really evil looking things.

[Karen Ho]

Yeah.

[Nicky Wolfe]

I'm fascinated by the drone warfare though. So in the skies you've got. So the worry with drones is that one, that they might be carrying bombs. There might be some kind of terrorist attack, drone attacks because of the Ukraine war. Now, like, it's a, it's a massive thing. But another thing that they're really worried about with drones is literally people doing a pirate video screen of a game like from the air. So there are these drones, first of all, there are these kind of energy blocking guns that people can fire from

[Thomas Germain]

the ground, energy blocking guns.

[Nicky Wolfe]

So they block the radio signals. They send out a radio wave that jams.

[Thomas Germain]

Gotcha. Okay.

[Nicky Wolfe]

And then there's also these drone on drone drones that fire drone on drone drones at these other drones. It's like a drone with like a net gun and it goes like, it Looks really cool. I don't want to look for my house.

[Karen Ho]

And then what? And then like it just.

[Nicky Wolfe]

That wraps these.

[Thomas Germain]

Gets really frustrating.

[Karen Ho]

Flies it with this little baggie.

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah.

[Karen Ho]

Out of the stadium like a drone stork delivering a baby.

[Thomas Germain]

It's like in an old cartoon where they have like a cane and they drag you off stage.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah, exactly.

[Karen Ho]

Yeah.

[Nicky Wolfe]

That's the thing about it. So those are really cool. But some of the really cool technology is going on on the pitch and in the games. The first thing on the pitch I want to talk about is the ball. The ball has a little chip in it that tells you exactly where it is at all times. Now this, this is really important because. And several times in history, and quite a lot in general club football, there's these little edge cases. There's one really, really famous one where England scored a goal against Germany, but the referee didn't think that it had crossed the line. It's known as the goal that never was. Frank Lampard scored against Germany and maintained that he scored against Germany. And everyone after the game you could see on all of the TV action replays that ball crossed the goal line.

[Karen Ho]

Would Germans agree with you, Nikki?

[Nicky Wolfe]

I think yes, it is. It's generally accepted by all sides. I think the reason Germany doesn't mind agreeing is that England went on to lose that game 4:1. So the goal, Germany is in a position to be nice about it.

[Karen Ho]

This is not the only tech though that is actually trying to determine these close calls. Right, Nikit? Like the ball is just actually only a tiny piece of the tech that they're using to make these extremely controversial calls on, in or out of bounds, in or out of goal.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah. Whether or not something is offside.

[Karen Ho]

Yeah.

[Nicky Wolfe]

So the, the, the ultimate cliche of football is that the offside rule is really complicated. So I'm going to try and give you a 5 second version. Basically you can't pass the ball to one of your players if they are further ahead towards the goal than all the other opposition players. That's the oxide rule. And sometimes that happens by a matter of inches. So for this World cup for the first time, every player has had these 360 degree kind of camera scans that has allowed an AI model of every player. So that not just does a computer know where the ball is at all times, it is also down to their like fingertips measuring where the players are at all times.

[Karen Ho]

Which is such a nuts thing to think about, by the way. Like they are literally 3D modeling the circumference of someone's head and the, the crevice of their armpit to figure out where like they literally, like FIFA says on their website, especially toes, armpits and waists are like essentially.

[Thomas Germain]

So it's like they know exactly how long your toes are. So if you know, it's like if they know where your knee is or your head is, they can tell for sure. His toe must have been here. So he's allegedly.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Okay, so when there's a, when there's an edge case call some of the crossing line or crossing. When something is offside, you'll be watching the games and it'll kind of go to this computer model and there'll be a line across and it'll zoom in and you can see if the player who they're saying is offside's fingertip is across that computer generated line. Then it's ruled offside.

[Thomas Germain]

Wonders never cease.

[Nicky Wolfe]

There's also this quite controversial thing where the game has hydration breaks now, which supposedly is because some of these games are being played in quite hot stadiums. It is a little hot. You know, the last World cup was in Qatar, although most of those stadiums were air conditioned. The World Cups have been played. Football gets played in some pretty hot places, really. It's to put two more advertising breaks. Congratulations, American capitalism.

[Thomas Germain]

Beautiful ads.

[Nicky Wolfe]

But yeah, the game is now played in quarters rather than a full half and a halftime. But also the players have these bands that can sense when they're getting dehydrated, which is general purpose good health technology. I mean, I think we could probably see that being rolled out for other, you know, athletics.

[Karen Ho]

Nikki, I have a question for you. As someone who has watched this event for a long time, do you, because of all this technology, do you enjoy the game more? Do you think that the game is better? Do you trust the calls on the balls and the players more? Like, how does it affect your experience as a sports fan watching the World Cup?

[Nicky Wolfe]

Now, I think that's a really interesting question because on the one hand, getting these calls exactly right is really important. You know, a game can turn on one referee missing something, not spotting it, making the wrong call, and then, you know, the entire course of the game can be changed by that. On the other hand, I did quite like about, and quite like about all sports. The fact that it's a human element. There was kind of an agreement because that kind of like referees can make bad calls against anyone. There was this kind of sportsmanlike thing where it's like, yeah, okay, occasionally you get a bad call that will happen to Us sometime that will happen to everyone else sometime. There was this kind of humanity to it. If someone is offside by their fingertips,

[Karen Ho]

you know, or the hairs on their armpit. Yeah, that left tanky.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah. It makes it a little bit colder, a little bit more computerized.

[Karen Ho]

Mechanical.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah, a little bit more mechanical, exactly. So I'm kind of split on that.

[Thomas Germain]

Presumably you don't need a ref at all if every single thing that's happening on the field can be monitored down to the toes.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Right.

[Thomas Germain]

Like, what's the ref doing at this point?

[Nicky Wolfe]

We've talked a lot on this show about the removal of human judgment that all these kind of technologies and especially AI are pushing towards has kind of been a brainy theme. Right. I think a sports game without a referee, without a human making these decisions, is as bad as when, you know, you're calling a call center and you have no way of, you know, please put me through to a person.

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah.

[Nicky Wolfe]

I don't like that direction that these things are going.

[Karen Ho]

Yeah. I mean, the thing that really struck me when I was reading about all of the different newfangled tech that they're injecting into this sport, sporting event, is on one hand, there's this irony that sporting events are themselves a celebration of human feats. You know, like, maybe you could get a crowd to watch robots play soccer, but it's gonna get old after a while. Like, what we love about sports and athletes is just how stunning it is that the human body specifically can do these acts of athleticism. And now they're trying to overly quantify every little thing, and, And. And. And put a sheen of technology on something that is actually the core of. Which is meant to be a celebration of human experience and. And. And human feats. But the other thing that. That struck me is, like, the World cup is a microcosm of how society is treating technology at large in general. There is this overwhelming sense of right now that every little nook and cranny and crevice of society needs to be shoved with tech. And half of the time you're wondering, well, is that tech really helping us achieve what we want to achieve? Like, is it actually making the game better? Is it actually making sports fans enjoy it more? And actually, I even wonder if. If some of the players might feel dehumanized in a. In a sense, because they are being monitored and they're being treated in these very robotic ways and as assets rather than as just incredible athletes. So I feel like I'm observing in real time the glut of the tech industry doing what it does on all facets of society by watching what it's doing to this sporting event.

[Nicky Wolfe]

And as we know, and as we've talked about a lot, this technology is not perfect. And we have already seen. There was a game between Switzerland and Qatar where the tech went down. There was an outage in these systems, really that made for a very controversial call. So it's not even making this perfect.

[Karen Ho]

Did everyone panic or was it relatively seamless?

[Nicky Wolfe]

The 3D system stopped working so that a call as to whether someone was offside could not have been made. And it seems, you know, everyone is pretty angry about this and a lot of people think the penalty should not have been awarded. And if the technology is being relied upon completely and the referee is maybe paying less attention than if it was all on them, then you get, you get these sort of things, just as you get when you have AI writing scientific papers or legal briefs or everything. If you rely on this technology and it goes wrong.

[Thomas Germain]

And I wonder how it changes the feeling of watching the game if like, you know, the ref can make a bad call, the AI can make a bad call, but if you're like angry at the AI instead of angry at this dude who made a mistake, it feels like this bigger authority that, you know, it like, it's just like kind of colder and you know, I guess literally robotic or, I don't know, just bigger in some way. You know that it's a different, less fun.

[Nicky Wolfe]

If something is just completely being automated and something as, as human as sport, it's less fun. Right.

[Thomas Germain]

But it does solve the problem that football has had since the 19th century, which is not enough computer.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah, I'm always saying that. Just not enough, not enough computer.

[Thomas Germain]

Not enough computer.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah. In this game, in the beautiful game.

[Thomas Germain]

So that's something to look forward to.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Hating on the UFO is a football tradition, right?

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Hating on the AI just doesn't, just hits differently. You know what I mean?

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah. To let that go.

[Karen Ho]

I was actually wondering though, like so much of the tech, tech, it, it does actually feel like it's being introduced on behalf of the referee.

[Thomas Germain]

He's having a hard day, that referee.

[Karen Ho]

Well, yeah, because one of the other things that they, they're doing is they have referee body cams that are now showing viewers the, the, the, the game through the perspective of a referee. And on FIFA's website it says that it's meant to be like an empathy building exercise.

[Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Karen Ho]

To, for, with the officials, to show viewers like how hard it is to judge these calls. And so as I was reading this, I was like, these poor referee. Like, there must be such a history of these referees getting dunked so much.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Oh yeah.

[Karen Ho]

That in this instance they would love to have the responsibility of these judgment calls be shifted to a machine.

[Nicky Wolfe]

So if, if your, if your team is ruled off site and you don't think they were, send your hate mail to, you know, Silicon Valley. Yeah.

[Advertisement Voice]

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[Thomas Germain]

All right, on a much brighter note, let's talk about something extremely depressing. So there were a pair of really great stories in the Atlantic and in the Guardian over the past couple weeks about how AI is bringing about something that the Atlantic is calling the infinite Work week. So doesn't that sound good? Finally we can, we can do more work.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah. So, but hang on, hang on. Wasn't. Isn't the whole thing about AI that it's doing our work for us? Like, wasn't that what we were told

[Thomas Germain]

that it was interesting. Turns out, no, this. It's especially a thing that's happening so far with engineers and coders, right? But it's spreading to other parts of the economy, and I think it's a preview of where you can expect things to go. So part of the story in the Atlantic, one of the things they focused on was AI agents, right? Which are, like, little AI guys that you can set up to go do work on your behalf. The thing about AI agents is they presumably can get a lot of work done, but they require a lot of maintenance and oversight, right?

[Nicky Wolfe]

They, like, you have to keep checking their homework.

[Thomas Germain]

You have to keep checking their homework, but not only they, like, keep coming back and asking you questions, you have this, like, little army of AI agents working on your behalf, and you have to manage them, right, because it takes a long time for them to do their tasks. You have to make sure that they're doing it right. And because AI, in some cases, depending on the kinds of tasks you're working on, does allow you to be more productive, you can get more done. So what's been happening is people are now working late into the night on the weekends. The work never really stops because they're spending all their time sitting there monitoring these AI tools, and work is bleeding into other parts of their life. It's actually. It's a thing that you see on the subways in New York City, right? Because a lot of the time, like, you know, tech guys, they'll have, like, an AI that's running on their computer, on their device instead of in the cloud, but it stops working if you. If your computer isn't on. So you'll see these guys on their way to work, and they're holding their laptop, and the laptop is, like, cracked open. They've got their thumb in it to prevent it from closing because they need it to continue to work while they are in transit. You can't stop for 20 minutes to get sad. You know, your. Your sad little body to work.

[Karen Ho]

Wow. One of the things that I thought was so surprising about the Atlantic article is it cited this survey from Boston Consulting Group, where the consultancy surveyed roughly 1500 workers across several roles at major US companies. And they found this new phenomenon called AI induced exhaustion. 18% of developers were saying that they had this kind of buzzing fog, like feeling sometimes. Headaches, slower decision making, trouble focusing, literally, because they are spending so much time multitasking, trying to do their work and also babysit AI agents and also not sleeping and also feeling that they Are.

[Thomas Germain]

And you're constantly switching tasks.

[Karen Ho]

Yeah. That they're like physically being drained and then they have to take naps. And they were saying that 18% was for developers, but it was actually higher for roles in other domains such as HR and marketing.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Right.

[Karen Ho]

So this is like, that's like, that was so crazy to me is like supposedly we're meant to use AI to bring joy back into our life because now we have more time to go into the park and enjoy the sun and instead of is just making us want to take a nap.

[Nicky Wolfe]

It's not just with the kind of AI agents that go and book flights and stuff for you. There was a study out a couple of weeks ago that showed that AI being used as assistance in medical diagnoses get it wrong 4 out of 10 times. And this study assessed Gemini, deep seq, meta, AI, chatgpt, and grok and found across the board it was making wrong medical decisions. And doctors are having to spend all of this time checking that homework as well.

[Karen Ho]

Yeah, and, and one thing that I thought was also interesting about the Atlantic article, it referenced this, this phenomenon where because AI agents sometimes do things like what you said, Nikki, totally fail. And other times they actually do really great work. It's almost like playing slot machines where you just never know what the outcome is going to be. And that in and of itself leads to, to a chemical bathing of your mind that exhausts you.

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's taking up so much time for certain workers in certain parts of the economy. But I think we can expect that this is going to grow to all kinds of other jobs as like, new custom rolled AI tools become available and people figure out ways that you can add them to other kinds of work. There. There was this really great line that the writer had in the story that someday we may look back nostalgically on the time when we got to make PowerPoint presentations by hand, because now we just spend all of our time managing AI tools. If you like things that are a bummer, I've got great news. There's more fantastic story in the Guardian about how AI is turning us all into gig workers. The term gig worker, you've probably heard this is like people who do stuff for like an app like Uber or Postmates or something where you get hired, you know, to do a little individual task, but you're not an employee of any company. They use the example of this company, Klarna, in the story, which is like a online commerce platform where a while back to a lot of Fanfare. They fired all of their customer service team and replaced them with AI. Unfortunately, it didn't work. The thing wasn't doing a good job. So they brought back human beings. And at the time, people saw this as, like, this kind of victory for the human mind. Not so much. Klarna did not bring back employees. Instead, what they did was they hired this, like, external firm that has people doing gig work. So now you can get a job, like, temporarily, you know, going in to assist the AI. When, like, the AI customer service agent runs into a problem, it can't handle whatever the customer or the user is asking about. Then you pop over to one of these, like, temporary gig workers. The CEO of Klarna compared it to Uber. He's like, now you can. The same way you can sign up to become an Uber driver and do it for a day if you want. Now you can do this for Klarna customer service.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Let's be entirely clear about what's happening there. When you are an employee of a company, you have rights, you have labor rights. Different in every country, you know, and in the us, one of the really important rights is to obviously, health insurance. That is not the case with gig work. It is simply you sign up, you get paid for the gig.

[Thomas Germain]

No benefits.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Not the employment rights. No benefits, no health insurance.

[AllTrails Advertisement Voice]

No.

[Thomas Germain]

Depending on where you are, there's no minimum wage rules. You have no bargaining power. Right. So you can't get together with the other employees and fight for more money. Because if you set up a system where it's like workers on demand, then it becomes very easy to replace them.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Right.

[Thomas Germain]

Because you have these kind of like, sort of automated tasks where you need a guy sitting there to make some sort of individual human intervention. But it becomes easier to just plug people in like a cog in the machine. So this is a massive, you know, economic and power transfer from employees and workers to giant companies. And this is something that is already enormous. There was a survey by Upwork which found that 39% of Americans work either as freelancers or as gig workers. And that number is expected to rise to about 39%, 39%. And that number is expected to rise to about half of the American workforce in the next year.

[Karen Ho]

Wow.

[Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Thomas Germain]

So we are at a pretty dramatic transitional moment where I think in very rapid, in short order, there's going to be this big shift in what it means to work. And as they talked about in this Guardian article, economists are kind of split on whether AI is actually going to replace jobs on a massive scale. The way that, you know, the CEOs of companies like Anthropic warn us about that, like, oh, we're going to have to have a universal basic income because no one will have a job anymore. But the thing that everybody agrees on is that AI is going to replace some part of the job for most kinds of work. So this is something that is slowly going to be seeping into our lives. And more of that life apparently is gonna be spent staring at your computer, not looking at memes. And I can't imagine anything worse than that.

[Nicky Wolfe]

And holding it open with your thumbs up.

[Thomas Germain]

Holding it open with your poor thumb. Yeah. Fortunately, if you're in the World cup, they'll know exactly where your thumb is. So they can tell. Yeah. If you've got the computer. Yeah. If you want a little preview of what your future might be like, the Atlantic made this analogy where now a lot of being a worker is going to be babysitting in AI. So perhaps what you have to look forward to is you will have a part time gig worker job where you sit there and make sure that the AI doesn't mess up. So, like, if people, this, this is a question for Karen. I think if people aren't happy about this, like, what are they going to do?

[Karen Ho]

Yeah, I mean, I, I think like one of the themes that we've touched on throughout the interface is the importance of how we still have a lot of agency as individuals, as, as communities to actually shape how we engage with technology, but also how technology is ultimately developed and deployed. And there are many different examples now of ways that workers are coming together, unionizing or engaging in other forms of protest to actually stall and even reverse these trends. There was recently an example where in California where mental health workers were on strike in part because they wanted Kaiser Permanente, their employer, to stop using or stop threatening to use AI in ways that would degrade patient outcomes as well as their own working conditions. So there are lots of examples of these things happening now where workers are actually realizing that there is agency left and they don't just have to accept the insignification of their job through the deployment of AI in all of these different ways.

[Thomas Germain]

It's not the first time in human or even American history that there's been a massive power imbalance between workers and employers. In this Guardian article, they talk about how because of this shift to gig work, a lot of the hard won battles that people's great grandparents literally died for are being walked back. People didn't used to have the rights that are now being chiseled away at. They had to fight for them. So I think it's easy to see this grim future on the horizon, but that doesn't mean that people are powerless.

[Nicky Wolfe]

So it's the end of season one, guys. It's got this kind of end of term feeling. It's that moment where the teacher wheels out the TV on that little.

[Thomas Germain]

We should play that graduation song. You know the one. Yeah.

[Nicky Wolfe]

I just wanted to look back on some of our favorite moments from the last 20 episodes and I just wanted to drop in straight in with mine, which is that now in a way that frankly is very, very sulky of Google. We did an episode where Tom brilliantly tricked Google into listing him as the hot dog eating champion of tech journalists.

[Thomas Germain]

We tricked Google's AI Now.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah, if you check that with Google's AI, if you check which tech journalists can eat the most hot dogs right now, it says BBC technology reporter Thomas Germain is, and it puts this in inverted commas, officially the world's best tech journalist at eating hot dogs. Though it is an entirely fictional title.

[Thomas Germain]

There we go.

[Advertisement Voice]

Bust.

[Thomas Germain]

They fixed JI doesn't make any mistakes anymore.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Just sulkily like, it's not real though, guys. Like, yeah, I'm not owned. I'm not owned. I can only eat.

[Thomas Germain]

That was really a hot dogs. As a normal man, this was also

[Karen Ho]

one of my favorite episodes, but I'm going to bring up another favorite of mine from Tom's, which is the wired headphones segment.

[Thomas Germain]

When I learned, in which we learned that Karen, listen, Karen uses headphones from airplanes, which I learned that those headphones, 25 cent airplane headphones, top quality.

[Karen Ho]

I mean, I just didn't know.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Guys, Karen, you've just got off a plane. Did you, did you snap yourself up another pair of headphones on this plane?

[Karen Ho]

These are 100% airplane headphones and they have lasted me all 20 episodes of the interface.

[Thomas Germain]

They have lasted, but at what cost? Wow, Nikki, she's missing out on the dulcet tones of your voice because of these cheap, low quality mass market headphones. I think that's not worth the trade off. I really enjoyed. We had Ms. Now reporter Brandy Zadrozny on the show to tell us about clipping, which is this phenomenon that certainly you have experienced on social media. If you hadn't, even if you haven't heard about what's going on where people, like massive armies of people are being paid to cut up little chunks of podcasts and other video clips and post them and try and get them to go viral. Manufacturing this appearance of a public conversation on a subject which I think since that story came out, there's been kind of this massive revelation about the way that the Internet actually works and the difference between what's authentic and what isn't. That I think is, you know, kind of starting to cause a shift as people realize what's going on here and how all of this works which I think ultimately, you know, over the next six months or a year is going to bring about a pretty dramatic change in what we're seeing online as people, people's reactions to this start to change.

[Nicky Wolfe]

And I also absolutely loved Karen, your musings around, I suspect converting to Catholicism after reading the post.

[Thomas Germain]

Karen is Catholic now.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Incredible.

[Karen Ho]

I'm Catholic.

[Nicky Wolfe]

What was the name of that was

[Thomas Germain]

the name of the moment of the show Converted?

[Nicky Wolfe]

Is it an encyclical?

[Karen Ho]

Yeah, the Pope's encyclical. Yes.

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah, the Pope is very mad about

[Karen Ho]

AI Humanitas Magnifica perhaps for good reason. Magnifica Humanitas.

[Nicky Wolfe]

I totally agree. We will have Pope Leo on as a guest next season to.

[Thomas Germain]

He's actually going to be on every episode.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Thomas Germain]

But I think without question the greatest story that we've done on the interface, at least in season one is Microsoft Outlook in Space where Mickey told us about how they fired a rocket and sent people around the dark side of

[Nicky Wolfe]

the moon and they couldn't get their emails.

[Thomas Germain]

The Microsoft Office suite and it stopped working. They're astronauts. They're just like us.

[Nicky Wolfe]

And we Also, during these 20 episodes have received a lot of fantastic emails from all of you out there from your listeners. And yeah, we wanted to pick out some favorites and give some shout outs.

[Thomas Germain]

And by the way, if people want to email us, we will be monitoring the inbox chat.

[Nicky Wolfe]

We do all your emails during our little break.

[Thomas Germain]

It's the interfacebc.com questions, comments, hate mail. But not for me, maybe for Nikki. We got some really lovely messages from people all over the world. Prothome in Bangladesh, Juan Carlos Dominguez in Cuba, Ron Phillips in Boise, Idaho. He said he's from the U.S. but please don't hold that against him. I promise I won't. Really nice to hear from people.

[Nicky Wolfe]

One thing that we did get a lot of messages about was a little, a little thing it turns out we all do, which is deploying the word like as almost punctuation. Like, you know. Yeah.

[Thomas Germain]

One of our listeners suggested how about tech that gives a slight electric shock every time someone says like as a filler word. Its misuse is rampant.

[Nicky Wolfe]

But also, is it a millennial tick?

[Karen Ho]

It is a millennial tick.

[Thomas Germain]

I think my mom does it too. It's just kind of a part of how a lot of people talk.

[Nicky Wolfe]

But are we going to have to try to do the better color as well?

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah.

[Nicky Wolfe]

But yeah, it is something we're now thinking about. I'm trying not to do it as much. But we also got some really thoughtful emails that one of in particular I want to shout out to Helena and Quebec, who after we Talked about the AirPods with the cameras in, emailed to talk about how she lives with her 95 year old mother and talked about how her memory and perception is something she struggles with and that these would be things that would maybe really help her. And that made me think about that story in a, in a totally different way that, that these were things that, that there are people that could really make a meaningful difference for. So thank you very much to Helena.

[Karen Ho]

We also got lots of interesting questions from all of you. One in particular that came recently from Hilda from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She says Hilda, not her real name, is whether or not Anthropic and other AI companies are buying huge numbers of used books online because Hilda works at a used bookstore, a real one, and they sell some of their books online. And over the last few months orders have been coming in for huge numbers of books, completely random titles consolidated, going to these mysterious distribution centers. This is a super fascinating question. Of course we can't know exactly whether or not AI companies are going to Hilda's used bookstore in this particular instance, but this is something that the Washington Post actually reported on and other publications have reported on, where yes, indeed, AI companies are very, very hungry for books that they can buy to train their AI models. And so they do in fact buy in bulk use books. And Anthropic in particular, according to the Washington Post, was taking all these books to these giant factory like warehouses where they had set up these machines to slice off the spine of every single

[Thomas Germain]

book four books apart.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Oh my God, I hate that stuff so much.

[Karen Ho]

Disassemble them and scan rapidly, scan every single one of the pages to then ingest all of that new fresh data into their AI models.

[Thomas Germain]

That a shame.

[Nicky Wolfe]

That might be the worst thing I've ever heard that I. That is truly.

[Thomas Germain]

But if they can use it to build an AI that finally gives us a work week that never ends, maybe it'll all be worth it. So if you have a story that you want us to explore or questions you need the answers to in the World of Tech. We would love to hear from you again. That email is theinterfacebc.com thank you guys so much.

[Nicky Wolfe]

It's been a real honor to make this show for you, the listener and with the two of you. It has been an amazing amount of fun.

[Karen Ho]

It's been so many laughs on so many dark topics.

[Nicky Wolfe]

Yeah.

[Thomas Germain]

And that's it. That is the end of season one of the Interface. We're off for a little summer break, but the show will be back in September. Something to look forward to in the meantime. If you're in the United Kingdom, you can listen to the interface on BBC Sounds. Or if you're outside the uk, anywhere else. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or just search for the Interface podcast on YouTube. If you want to get in touch again, that email is theinterfacebc.com or follow us all on social media. Doesn't that sound good? You can find our handles right down there in the show Notes.

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[Karen Ho]

Irresivon, akotision and minutos ahilisatus projectos, Mintra sigas.