Are we entering a world without screens?

Karen Hao’s away this week — but it’s a special episode: Thomas and Nicky welcome their first ever guest, senior reporter at MS NOW, Brandy Zadrozny, to decode the tech stories rewiring your week and your world.

First: are we heading for a world without screens? Bloomberg reports Apple is in late‑stage testing of AirPods with tiny cameras - not for selfies, but to give Siri “eyes” so it can understand what you’re looking at and respond in real time. We explore what that signals: less phone‑tapping, more ambient “AI companion” computing - and why earbuds (oddly) might be a more plausible bridge to screenless tech than headsets or smart glasses. If the interface moves from screens to always‑on assistants, what changes about attention, privacy - and who gets to shape the world you experience?

Next: the hidden clipping industry flooding your feed - now in politics. Brandy takes us inside the booming “clipping economy”: armies of freelancers paid to slice long content into viral short‑form clips and push them across TikTok, Reels and Shorts until something hits. The twist is that the tactics that built internet stars are increasingly being borrowed to build candidates - blurring what’s organic and what’s engineered. We ask who’s hiring clippers, what kinds of accounts they use, how political disclosure rules get sidestepped, and what happens when elections are fought in the attention economy.

Finally: if AI can simulate public opinion, what even counts as a poll? Pollsters and researchers are experimenting with “synthetic” respondents - AI‑generated “digital twin” voters trained on real datasets - to answer questions at speed and scale. But if headlines still say “the public thinks…”, when the truth is “the model predicts…”, are polls measuring opinion - or shaping it? In a polling era already bruised by credibility crises, we ask what trust looks like when the respondents might not be human.

We reached out to Gallup for comment and they responded: Gallup does not currently publish approval or favorability ratings for individual political figures, and we have no plans to incorporate simulated responses on that subject now or in the future. We are in the beginning phases of some exploratory research on simulated responses. Through this work, we are hoping to learn whether AI systems and emerging methods can help deepen our understanding of how humans think and behave. You can read more about our approach in our methodology blog.

We also contacted Apple for comment but did not hear from them before the release of this episode.

The Interface is your weekly guide to the tech rewiring your week and your world. Hosted by journalists Thomas Germain and Nicky Woolf (and this week, with special guest Brandy Zadrozny), each episode unpacks, week by week, how technology is shaping all our futures. No jargon. Just sharp voices debating the tech stories that matter.

New episodes drop every Thursday on BBC Sounds in the UK. Outside the UK, find us on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts — or watch the video version on YouTube (search “The Interface podcast”).

To get in touch: [email protected] The Interface is a BBC Studios production. Producer: Natalia Rodriguez Ford Executive Editor: Philip Sellars