SF tech CEO's billboards are 'dystopian.' That's how he wants it.

By Stephen Council,Tech ReporterDec 9, 20241/2

Tech startup Artisan is a month into an ad campaign in San Francisco that criticizes human workers and plugs the company's AI replacements. One of the ads played on a digital billboard on Mission Street on Dec. 5, 2024.

Thursday afternoon in San Francisco:On one side of Mission Street, hotel workers chanted and banged on a drum outside the Marriott Marquis, part of a monthslong strike for higher wages and more jobs. On the other, a tech company’s billboard proclaimed, “Stop hiring humans.”

Various versions of the provocative advertisements are emblazoned across the city on rotating screen displays on bus shelters and on classic vinyl billboards on poles and buildings, plugging the San Francisco startup Artisan.

SFGATE spoke with Artisan’s CEO about the campaign. The company has just 30 employees and is less than 2 years old; its only existing product is an artificial intelligence “sales agent” called Artisan, built to automate the work of finding and messaging potential customers. It’s a classic AI-age idea, one of many such tools flooding the tech world.

But the billboards in San Francisco are less routine. Bleak might be a better word, or mean-spirited. And in a city laden with jargony advertisements, these are easy to understand. Most feature a dark-haired, purple-eyed persona and a few rows of text. Some critique humans and remote work: “Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance” and “Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never ‘not be working’ today.” Others are more direct: “Hire Artisans, not humans.” Several include the line, “The era of AI employees is here.”

The gist is crystal clear: Artisan is selling automation to employers. In a video spot about the “sales agent” tool online, Artisan says it works with “no human input” and “costs 96% less than hiring someone to do her job.” (More on that pronoun later.) *Another version of Artisan’s ads plays on a digital billboard on Mission Street on Dec. 5, 2024.

In the context of tech’s layoffs and AI’s specter, the ads have caused affront far beyond Mission Street.In a piece for Creative Bloq, British journalist Natalie Fear called the billboards a “dystopian nightmare.” Thousands of Redditors have seen posts about the ads in r/ThatsInsane (“giving the finger to all artists, writers, designers jobs,” the poster wrote) and r/graphic_design (Post title: “Human-designed billboard wants people to stop hiring humans…”).

Commenters piled on. “Have an AI child, not a real one,” one wrote, “they are much cheaper.” Another suggested that someone burn the billboard. One simply wrote: “It’s SF, they hate people.”

SFGATE reached Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack on Friday and asked how he responds to critiques of the billboards. He acknowledged the ads’ “dystopian” tone but stood by it.“They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI,” said the young CEO over text. “The way the world works is changing.”

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/sf-artisan-billboards-stop-hiring-humans-19969672.php

>>22148755

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Carmichael-Jack said his startup has seen a “crazy escalation” in its brand awareness thanks to the monthlong billboard campaign, plus a spike in sales leads. Artisan doesn’t have that many billboards up, he added, not providing a specific number, but they’ve been “very impactful.” In other words, the inflammatory ads served their purpose.

“We wanted something that would draw eyes — you don’t draw eyes with boring messaging,” the CEO said.

Artisan also used “Stop hiring humans” — in truly humongous font — as its booth banner at TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup-focused San Francisco conference in October. The billboards illustrate how scrappy startups can stand out from established tech giants with corporate reputations to uphold.

Salesforce incessantly plugged its similar “Agentforce” product at its Dreamforce megaconference in September but usually threw in a phrase about the AI agents working with humans too.

No such restraint at Artisan. And its ambitions go higher. The video plugging “Ava” teased new niches for Artisan tools beyond sales, in marketing, recruitment, design and finance. It also made the wild declaration:

“Ava marks the beginning of the next industrial revolution.”

SFGATE asked Carmichael-Jack about the decision to give his AI product a human name and face. It’s far from unusual — think Siri, Alexa — but it’s striking on the ads. The “Stop hiring humans” text sits just above an image of a woman. Aside from the purple eyes, matte skin and too-symmetrical face, it could easily be a real person.

The CEO said,“People still want to work with humans, and working with our Ava feels more like working with a human than a [software-as-a-service] product, so it makes sense for us to humanize her.”

And therein lies the quandary for executives who might consider replacing their sales reps with AI tools. When people still want to work with other humans, where does that leave the companies that decide to stop hiring them? Based on the rising interest in tools like Artisan, we may not have to wait long to find out.

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/sf-artisan-billboards-stop-hiring-humans-19969672.php

Work at a Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.

Tech billionaires are getting their chance to shape Washington. Here’s what they’ll do with it.

A new cadre of Silicon Valley CEOs and billionaires is descending on the capital — with very well-telegraphed ideas about how they can do everything better. By Derek Robertson 12/10/2024 08:13 PM EST1/2POLITICO

Washington is about to confront a cabal of outsiders — the tech billionaires, investors and Silicon Valley celebrities like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, whose ideas are suddenly central to the Trump transition.

Sometimes, outsiders are a true unknown, and it’s a puzzle for the capital to suss out what they want from politics,how they’re planning to approach it and what even inspired them to get involved in the first place. Not this time.

Unlike wealthy power players of another generation, whose ideas and influence were often cloaked and exercised through backroom deals, these tech moguls tend to talk about their policy preferences in public … a lot.

Whether on podcasts, lengthy posts on X and Substack, or through influential self-published manifestos, the tech characters now heavily involved in President-elect Donald Trump’s transition have a clear track record of demands, expectations and ideas, all delivered with the classic Silicon Valley confidence that they can run the government better than the government itself.

The picture that emerges is one of a sweeping deregulatory agenda touching everything from crypto to artificial intelligence to fields like the defense industry and health technology.

Their goals might not be uniform, but on the whole they see their innovations as dragging a moribund America into the future, with the government’s role either to help them do it or get out of the way entirely.

Andreessen — founder of venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, or a16z for short — is best known in tech-policy circles for his 5,000-plus-word “techno-optimist manifesto,” which made a searing case that regulators bent on stifling industry are killing America’s entrepreneurial spirit. In it, he nodded to an eclectic pantheon of heroes including free market economist Friedrich Hayek, transhumanist theorist Ray Kurzweil and Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Now he’s started to lay out even more specific policy thoughts:

Today Andreessen appeared on the podcast of Free Press founder Bari Weiss, envisioning Trump’s second term as a direct rebuke to what he views as a hostile, anti-tech Biden administration.

“When we endorsed Trump, we only did so on the basis of tech policy,” Andreessen said. “The crypto war, we were on the receiving end for four years and it was incredibly brutal, incredibly destructive; AI, we had meetings in D.C. in May where we talked to them about this and the meetings were absolutely horrifying and we came out basically deciding that we had to endorse Trump.”

Andreessen claimed that representatives of the Biden administration said that they would work to close off AI development and research to smaller actors, citing safety concerns — a life-or-death scenario for Andreessen, whose entire career and fortune are built on investing in startups. (White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson denied that assertion, telling POLITICO “President Biden’s landmark executive order on A.I. explicitly calls for increasing competition in the sector” and that the administration “worked with companies of all sizes to deepen U.S. leadership in AI.”)

That focus on opening up the economic playing field to all comers is what unites Andreessen and the more politically outspoken startup ecosystem with “Big Tech,” the established giants like Google and Microsoft, which have traditionally sought to stay politically neutral but have plenty to gain from a GOP-led deregulatory agenda.

Both sides said as much in a preelection blog post jointly written by Andreessen, his founding partner Ben Horowitz and Microsoft chair Satya Nadella, who wrote of a “policy opportunity for AI startups” that includes investment in AI resources, support for open-source development and a skeptical eye toward new regulation of the technology.

The trio said new tech regulations should be evaluated by how much they would benefit start-ups. “Regulation should be implemented only if its benefits outweigh its costs,” the trio wrote, elaborating that “In accounting for costs, policymakers should include an assessment of possible costs associated with unnecessary bureaucratic burdens to startups.”

https://archive.is/DIBqg

>>22148794

2/2That skeptical, pro-growth approach to government action dovetails nicely with the mission of Musk and entrepreneur (and former GOP presidential primary candidate) Vivek Ramaswamy’s DOGE, a committee outside government that will identify and recommend opportunities for Trump and Congress to downsize the federal government.

Its goal, they say, is to aggressively “liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.”

With Musk allies interviewing candidates for positions at departments as disparate as State and Defense, as The New York Times reported on Friday, tech moguls could have allies in place no matter where their increasingly powerful tools overlap with policy.

One example of how the tech right’s sweeping deregulatory agenda tends to encompass, well, everything, is energy. Many right-leaning tech thinkers see boosting America’s energy output as an imperative for reducing the cost of living, powering AI development and competing with China — and they’ve made common cause with mainstream Republicans to pump up growth by maxing out energy production.

David Friedberg, a venture capitalist and co-host of the “All In” podcast, said on an episode Friday that “More electricity means more automation means more AI means more things are being done … in factories, are being done by machines. …The regulatory structure prohibits our ability to actually expand electricity production capacity.”

So, to review: Crypto foes like Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler are out; podcasters/VCs/Trump allies like venture capitalist and Musk pal David Sacks are in. Biden environmental regulations perceived as blocking America’s energy production are out; more fossil fuel production as well as new energy sources like nuclear and geothermal are in. Safety-first AI regulations are out; competition among AI startups is in.

As ambitious as the tech right’s goals are, they might meet resistance to some extent even from … within the tech right.

One of the big arguments is emerging around antitrust: Vice President-elect JD Vance, a Peter Thiel protege, has supported the antitrust crusade waged against Big Tech by Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.

Some in the tech world have also cheered these developments, viewing the tech giants as complacent, excessively social justice-oriented dinosaurs that need to be brought to heel.

Trump has already tapped Vance ally and Big Tech foe Gail Slater to oversee the Department of Justice’s antitrust efforts, seen as a nod in favor of antitrust enforcement and setting up potential conflict within the administration.

But Khan and her view of how government should relate to industry are extremely unpopular with other large parts of the tech world, including venture capitalists who have widely derided her and the Biden administration for policies they say make the economy less dynamic by freezing mergers and acquisitions. At a San Francisco conference of the tech right DFD covered earlier this year, the atmosphere palpably chilled when her name was invoked.

There’s also immigration, which could be a point of tension between the tech right and the MAGA right, with the tech world largely supporting increased immigration for high-skilled workers. But as POLITICO’s Brendan Bordelon reported earlier this month, that view clashes with the MAGA call for a widespread crackdown on all immigration. Will Musk prevail, or Trump adviser Stephen Miller? When it comes to achieving their priorities in Washington, Silicon Valley mavens could find themselves face-to-face with a very familiar dynamic from the private sector: What the boss says, goes.

On one hand, “if [Trump is] surrounded by deregulatory tech types, then his administration will probably favor a deregulatory agenda, simply by osmosis,” Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the center-left think tank the Center For New Liberalism and author of the Infinite Scroll Substack, told POLITICO.

“But his one consistent point is that he really, really hates immigration and trade. … That’s the obvious point of tension,” he noted, warning that the Silicon Valley right is placing a major bet on its ability to guide the president-elect in their preferred direction, and that “a trade war is bad for tech, as is a broad crackdown on legal immigration.”

https://archive.is/DIBqg

Clash Report

@clashreport

Syrian revolutionary forces seized one of the largest drug and Captagon warehouses in Syria, which was run and traded by Bashar's brother Maher Assad.

4:14 AM · Dec 11, 2024

·328.2K Views

https://x.com/clashreport/status/1866773546237677595

Video points to Assad regime’s involvement in large-scale trafficking of illicit drugs

By Tim Lister, Kareem Khadder and Nechirvan Mando, CNN Wed December 11, 20241/2

A social media video surfaced Wednesday allegedly showing a warehouse in Syriastacked with captagon, an illicit drug that had transformed the country into a narco-state under former President Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

The large warehouse was reportedly located at the headquarters of a military division near Damascus that was commanded by Assad’s brother Maher. CNN is unable immediately to verify the location.

A voice commenting over the video says that it is “one of the largest warehouse facilities of captagon manufacturing of pills.” Piles of pills are seen on the floor along with drug-making equipment.

If confirmed, the discovery would support claims by the United States and others that the Assad regime had been involved in actively exporting the drug. Captagon has become a significant social problem in neighboring Arab nations and spurred some of them to engage in talks with the former Syrian regime to curb its trafficking.

It is a highly addictive drug, mostly containing amphetamine, that is sometimes described as the “poor man’s cocaine.”Studies over recent years have estimated the annual trade in the drug to be worth billions of dollars. It is believed to have become an economic lifeline for the Assad regime while it was under crippling American sanctions.

This week, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya reportedthe discovery of thousands of captagon pills at the Mazzeh airbase south of Damascus. The purported discovery, which CNN cannot confirm, was made at a branch of Air Force Intelligence, an arm of the Assad regime previously alleged to have been involved in the production and distribution of the drug.

Last year, the US Treasury sanctioned a number of Syrians closely associated with the Assad regime for their alleged involvement captagon trade.

“The Syrian regime and its allies have increasingly embraced the production and trafficking of captagon to generate hard currency, estimated by some to be in the billions of dollars,” the Treasury said.

Among those sanctioned were two cousins of Bashar al Assad and Khalid Qaddour, a close associate of Maher al-Assad who was described as a “key drug producer and facilitator” of captagon production in Syria.

On Sunday, after arriving in Damascus, the leader of the forces that overthrew the regime – Mohammad al Jolani – said Syria had become “the world’s leading source of captagon. But today, Syria is being purified by the grace of God almighty.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/11/middleeast/syria-captagon-assad-factory-video-intl/index.html

>>22148887

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Assad kept syrian citizens in drugged state.

In 2023, the Biden administration drew up a strategy to combat the captagon trade, saying that the vast majority was “produced by local Syrian factions linked to the Assad regime and Hezbollah” and that “large quantities of these captagon pills are shipped from Syrian ports such as Latakia or smuggled across the Jordanian and Iraqi borders.”

Leveraging the captagon trade

According to a report earlier this year by the Carnegie Endowment, the Assad regime and its allies had “leveraged captagon trafficking as a means of exerting pressure on the Gulf states, notably Saudi Arabia, to reintegrate Syria into the Arab world.”

It said production of the drug was “intertwined with the interests of powerful interest groups in Syria, including senior members of the leadership.”

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported last year that “the main departing area for captagon shipments” continued to be in Syria and Lebanon, “with destinations in the Gulf Arab countries reached either directly by land or sea, or indirectly with shipments through other regions.”

The UNODC also reported that the largest seizures of the drug – some two-thirds of the total – had been made in Saudi Arabia. CNN has previously reported on the widespread use of the drug in the kingdom.

In 2022, the Saudi ambassador in Beirut reported that the authorities in the kingdom had confiscated 700 million tablets smuggled from Lebanon since 2014.

Several studies estimate the trade in captagon to have surged over the last decade. The Middle East Institute reported that in 2021, nearly $6 billion of Syria-made captagon was seized abroad, and in April 2022 alone, 25 million captagon pills were intercepted in neighboring countries, worth some $500 million.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/11/middleeast/syria-captagon-assad-factory-video-intl/index.html

>>22148901

Very creative, I can't understand if it's funny or not.

Anons take a look at the new video of Trump and Elon, with all the known criminals. I think Trump and Elon get revenge at the end, not sure though.