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Today's Topics:
1. Nearly half of Gen Zers wish TikTok was never invented,
survey finds (Stephen Loosley)
2. Governing AI for Humanity, final report by UN body on
artificial intelligence (Stephen Loosley)
3. Real-Time Linux is finally in the mainline kernel
(Stephen Loosley)
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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2024 23:00:46 +0930
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: "link" <[email protected]>
Subject: [LINK] Nearly half of Gen Zers wish TikTok was never
invented, survey finds
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Nearly half of Gen Zers wish TikTok ?was never invented,? survey finds
By Beth Greenfield September 18, 2024
https://fortune.com/well/article/nearly-half-of-gen-zers-wish-social-media-never-invented/
The truth is out: About half of Gen Z wishes TikTok (47%) and X (50%) didn?t
exist.
That?s despite?or maybe because of?spending four hours a day on social media,
as more than half of respondents to a new survey say is their norm.
The findings, from a nationally representative poll of 1,006 Gen Z adults (ages
18-27) by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and the Harris Poll, offer a
sobering snapshot of how young adults are grappling with the addictive nature
of smartphones and social media.
Haidt, author of the controversial best-seller The Anxious Generation, who
touts four basic rules regarding children and smartphones?none before high
school, no social media before age 16, no phones in schools, and more
unsupervised play?shares the findings in a New York Times opinion piece on
Tuesday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/opinion/social-media-smartphones-harm-regret.html
He finds the amount of time Gen Z spends on social media?60% at four hours a
day and 23% at seven or more hours a day?to be ?astonishing,? particularly
since 60% also say social media has a negative impact on society (versus 32 who
say it has a positive impact).
And while 52% say social media has benefited their lives and 29% say it has
hurt them, young people from historically disadvantaged groups have found less
benefit, he writes, including 44% of women and 47% of LGBTQ respondents who say
social media has negatively impacted their mental health. That?s compared with
31% of men and 35% of non-LGBTQ respondents.
As far as wishing a platform ?was never invented,? TikTok and X got the most
votes, followed by Snapchat (43%), Facebook (37%), and Instagram (34%).
The lowest scores in this category went to the smartphone itself (21%),
messaging apps (19%), and streaming services such as Netflix (17%) and YouTube
(15%).
?We interpret these low numbers as indicating that Gen Z does not heavily
regret the basic communication, storytelling and information-seeking functions
of the internet,? Haidt writes. ?If smartphones merely let people text each
other, watch movies and search for helpful information or interesting videos
(without personalized recommendation algorithms intended to hook users), there
would be far less regret and resentment.?
While only 36% of those surveyed support social media bans for kids under 16,
69% support a law requiring social media companies to develop a child-safe
option for kids under 18.
That?s something the House of Representatives is considering right now, Haidt
notes, urging legislators to take action on the Kids Online Safety Act. That
would, for starters, disable addictive product features and require tech
companies to let young users turn off personalized algorithmic feeds. (On
Tuesday, Instagram responded to the growing concern about young people and
social media, announcing it would make all teen accounts private by default.)
Haidt signs off his opinion piece by asking readers to imagine that
walkie-talkies were harming millions of young people, and that more than a
third of young people wished they didn?t exist, ?yet still felt compelled to
use them for five hours every day.?
If that were the case, he argues, ?we would take action. We?d insist that the
manufacturers make their products safer and less addictive for kids. Social
media companies must be held to the same standard: Either fix their products to
ensure the safety of young users or stop providing them to children altogether.?
--
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2024 23:24:06 +0930
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: "link" <[email protected]>
Subject: [LINK] Governing AI for Humanity, final report by UN body on
artificial intelligence
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
AI governance can?t be left to the vested interests
By Natasha Lomas Office of the UN Secretary / General?s Envoy on Technology
September 19, 2024
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/19/ai-governance-cant-be-left-to-the-vested-interests/
A final report by the UN?s high level advisory body on artificial intelligence
makes for, at times, a surreal read.
Named ?Governing AI for Humanity?, the document underlines the contradictory
challenges of making any kind of governance stick on such a fast developing,
massively invested and heavily hyped technology.
On the one hand, the report observes ? quite correctly ? that there?s ?a global
governance deficit with respect to AI.?
On the other, the UN advisory body dryly points out that: ?Hundreds of [AI]
guides, frameworks and principles have been adopted by governments, companies
and consortiums, and regional and international organizations.? Even as this
report adds plus-one-more set of recommendations to the AI governance pile.
The overarching problem the report is highlighting is there?s a patchwork of
approaches building up around governing AI, rather than any collective
coherence on what to do about a technology that?s both powerful and stupid.
AI automation can certainly be powerful: press the button and you get outputs
scaled on demand. But AI can also be stupid because, despite what the name
implies, AI is not intelligence; its outputs are a reflection of its inputs;
and bad inputs can lead to very bad (and unintelligent) outcomes.
Add scale to stupidity and AI can cause very big problems indeed, as the report
highlights. For instance, it can amplify discrimination or spread
disinformation. Both of which are already happening, in all sorts of domains,
at problematic scale, which leads to very real world harms.
But those with commercial irons in the generative AI fire that?s been raging
over the past few years are so in thrall to the potential scale upside of this
technology that they?re doing everything they can to downplay the risks of AI
stupidity.
In recent years, this has included heavy lobbying about the idea that the world
needs rules to protect against so-called AGI (artificial general intelligence),
or the concept of an AI that can think for itself and could even out-think
humans. But this is a flashy fiction intended to grab policymakers? attention
and focus lawmakers? minds on non existent AI problems, thereby normalizing the
harmful stupidities of current gen AI tools. (So really, the PR game being
played is about defining and defusing the notion of concept of ?AI Safety? by
making it mean let?s just worry about science fiction.)
A narrow definition of AI safety serves to distract from the vast environmental
harms of pouring ever more compute power, energy and water into building data
centers big enough to feed this voracious new beast of scale. Debates about
whether we can afford to keep scaling AI like this are not happening at any
high level ? but maybe they should be?
The ushered in spector of AGI also serves to direct the conversation to skip
over the myriad legal and ethical issues chain-linked to the development and
use of automation tools trained on other people?s information without their
permission. Jobs and livelihoods are at stake. Even whole industries. And so
are individual people?s rights and freedoms.
Words like ?copyright? and ?privacy? scare AI developers far more than the
claimed existential risks of AGI because these are clever people who haven?t
actually lost touch with reality.
But those with a vested interest in scaling AI choose to harp only about the
potential upside of their innovations in order to minimize the application of
any ?guardrails? (to use the minimalist metaphor of choice when technologists
are finally forced to apply limits to their tech) standing in the way of
achieving greater profits.
Toss in geopolitical rivalries and a bleak global economic picture and nation
states? governments can often be all too willing to join the AI hype and fray,
pushing for less governance in the hopes it might help them scale their own
national AI champions.
With such a skewed backdrop, is it any wonder AI governance remains such a
horribly confusing and tangled mess? Even in the European Union where, earlier
this year, lawmakers did actually adopt a risk-based framework for regulating a
minority of applications of AI, the loudest voices discussing this landmark
effort are still decrying its existence and claiming the law spells dooms for
the bloc?s chances of homegrown innovation. And they?re doing that even after
the law got watered down after earlier tech industry lobbying (led by France,
with its eye on the interests of Mistral, its hope for a national GenAI
champion).
A new push to deregulate EU privacy laws
Vested interests aren?t stopping there, either. We now have Meta, owner of
Facebook and Instagram ? turned Big AI developer ? openly lobbying to
deregulate European privacy laws to remove limits on how it can use people?s
information to train AIs. Will no one rid Meta of this turbulent data
protection regulation so it can strip-mine Europeans of their culture for ad
profit?
Its latest open letter lobbying against the EU?s General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR), which was written up in the WSJ, loops in a bunch of other
commercial giants also willing to deregulate for profit, including Ericsson,
Spotify and SAP.
?Europe has become less competitive and less innovative compared to other
regions and it now risks falling further behind in the AI era due to
inconsistent regulatory decision making,? the letter reportedly suggests.
Meta has a long history of breaking EU privacy law ? chalking up a majority of
the ten largest ever GDPR fines to date, for example, and racking up billions
of dollars in fines ? so it really shouldn?t be a poster child for lawmaking
priorities. Yet, when it comes to AI, here we are! Having broken so many EU
laws, we?re apparently supposed to listen to Meta?s ideas for removing the
obstacle of having laws to break in the first place? This is the kind of
magical thinking AI can provoke.
But the really scary thing is there?s a danger lawmakers might inhale this
propaganda and hand the levers of power to those who would automate everything
? putting blind faith in a headless god of scale in the hopes that AI will
automagically deliver economic prosperity for all.
It?s a strategy ? if we can even call it that ? which totally ignores the fact
that the last several decades of (very lightly regulated) digital development
have delivered the very opposite: a staggering concentration of wealth and
power sucked in by a handful of massive platforms ? Big Tech.
Clearly, platform giants want to repeat the trick with Big AI. But policymakers
risk walking mindlessly down the self-serving pathways being recommended to
them by its handsomely rewarded army of policy lobbyists. This isn?t remotely
close to a fair fight ? if it?s even a fight at all.
Economic pressures are certainly driving a lot of soul searching in Europe
right now. A much anticipated report earlier this month by the Italian
economist Mario Draghi on the never-so-sensitive topic of the future of
European competitiveness itself chafes at self-imposed ?regulatory burdens?
that are also specifically described as ?self-defeating for those in the
digital sectors?.
Given the timing of Meta?s open letter, it?s surely aiming to hook into the
same conclusion. But that?s hardly surprising: Meta and several of the others
adding their signatures to this push to deregulate EU privacy laws are among
the long list of companies that Draghi directly consulted for his report.
(Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, the economist?s contributor disclosure
list does not include any digital rights or human rights groups, aside from the
consumer group BEUC.)
Recommendations from the UN AI advisory group
The asymmetry of interests driving AI uptake while simultaneously seeking to
downgrade and dilute governance efforts, makes it hard to see how a genuinely
global consensus can emerge on how to control AI?s scale and stupidity. But the
UN AI advisory group has a few solid-looking ideas if anyone is willing to
listen.
The report?s recommendations include setting up an independent international
scientific panel to survey AI capabilities, opportunities, risks and
uncertainties and identify areas where more research is needed with a focus on
the public interest (albeit, good luck finding academics not already on Big
AI?s payroll).
Another recommendation is intergovernmental AI dialogues that would take place
twice a year on the margins of existing UN meeting to share best practices,
exchange info and push for more international interoperability on governance.
The report also nmentions an AI standards exchange that would maintain a
register of definitions and work to foster standards harmonization
internationally.
The UN body also suggests creating what it calls an ?AI capacity development
network? to pool expertise and resources to support the development of AI
governance within governments and for the public interest; and also setting up
a global fund for AI to tackle digital divides that the unequal distribution of
automation technology also risks scaling drastically.
On data, the report suggests establishing what it calls a ?global AI data
framework? to set definitions and principles for governing training data,
including with a view to ensuring cultural and linguistic diversity. The effort
should establish common standards around the provenance of data and its use ?
to ensure ?transparent and rights-based accountability across jurisdictions?.
The UN body also recommends setting up data trusts and other mechanisms that it
suggests could help foster AI growth without compromising information
stewardship, such as through ?well-governed global marketplaces for exchange of
anonymized data for training AI models? and via ?model agreements? to allow for
cross border access to data.
A final recommendation is for the UN to establish an AI Office within the
Secretariat to act as a coordination body, reporting to the secretary general
to provide support, engage in outreach and advise the UN chief. And one thing
is clear: AI is going to demand a massive mobilization of effort, organization
and sweating toil if we?re to avoid the vested interests setting the governance
agenda.
--
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2024 23:43:58 +0930
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: "link" <[email protected]>
Subject: [LINK] Real-Time Linux is finally in the mainline kernel
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Twenty years later, real-time Linux makes it to the kernel - really
The work done on real-time Linux has benefitted the open-source OS for years,
but it was only this week that Linus Torvalds admitted its last piece into the
mainline kernel. Exactly what took so long?
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor Sept. 18, 2024
https://www.zdnet.com/article/20-years-later-real-time-linux-makes-it-to-the-kernel-really/
VIENNA -- After 20 years, Real-Time Linux (PREEMPT_RT) is finally -- finally --
in the mainline kernel. Linus Torvalds blessed the code while he was at Open
Source Summit Europe. Why is this a big deal? Let's start by explaining what a
real-time operating system (RTOS) is and what it's good for.
What is an RTOS?
An RTOS is a specialized operating system designed to handle time-critical
tasks with precision and reliability. Unlike general-purpose operating systems
like Windows or macOS, an RTOS is built to respond to events and process data
within strict time constraints, often measured in milliseconds or microseconds.
As Steven Rostedt, a prominent real-time Linux developer and Google engineer,
put it, "Real-time is the fastest worst-case scenario."
He means that the essential characteristic of an RTOS is its deterministic
behavior. An RTOS guarantees that critical tasks will be completed within
specified deadlines. Many people assume that RTOSs are for fast processes.
They're not. Speed is not the point in RTOSs -- reliability is. This
predictability is crucial in applications where timing is essential, such as
industrial control systems, medical devices, and aerospace equipment.
One example of real-time operating systems in use today is VxWorks, which is
used in NASA's Mars rovers to guide them, and in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner
aircraft to control avionics systems, ensuring real-time responsiveness for
flight controls. Another example is QNX Neutrino, which is widely used in cars
for infotainment, and advanced driver-assistance systems such as anti-lock
brakes.
Real-time Linux's history
The real-time Linux code is now baked into all Linux distros as of the
forthcoming Linux 6.12 kernel. This means Linux will soon start appearing in
more mission-critical devices and industrial hardware. But it took its sweet
time getting here.
The story of real-time Linux began in the late 1990s when there was a growing
need for Linux to support real-time applications. The initial efforts focused
on creating separate real-time kernels that ran alongside the Linux kernel.
This included academic projects such as KURT from the University of Kansas;
RTAI, from the University of Milano; and New Mexico Institute of Mining and
Technology's RTLinux.
Ingo Molnar, a senior Linux kernel developer, started collecting and reshaping
pieces of these technologies in 2004 to build the foundation for the real-time
preemption patch set PREEMPT_RT.
This approach was different from earlier real-time Linux solutions as it
modified the existing Linux kernel rather than creating a separate real-time
kernel. By 2006, it had gained enough traction that Linus Torvalds observed,
"Controlling a laser with Linux is crazy, but everyone in this room is crazy in
his own way. So if you want to use Linux to control an industrial welding
laser, I have no problem with you using PREEMPT_RT."
By 2009, a small team of kernel developers, including Thomas Gleixner, Peter
Ziljstra, and Rostedt, had finished consolidating previous prototypic
developments into a single out-of-tree patch set. It was then that many
companies started using this patch set to build industrial systems requiring
hard real-time properties with millisecond precision.
As the project moved forward, many elements of it moved into the kernel.
Rostedt told me that, in a way, it's wrong to say that real-time is only now in
Linux. Many of its features have been introduced into mainstream Linux over the
years. Some of these, indeed, are essential to the Linux you use every day.
For example, chances are you've never heard of "NO_HZ," which reduces power
consumption in idle systems. NO_HZ is what enables Linux to run efficiently on
machines with thousands of CPUs. "You don't realize how much Linux improved
because of the real-time patch," Rostedt emphasized. "The only reason why Linux
runs in data centers today is because of the work we did."
So, without NO_HZ, Linux wouldn't be running essentially all data centers.
This, in turn, explains why Linux runs the cloud. I don't know exactly what the
world would look like without this real-time contribution, but it wouldn't look
anything like it does today.
Real-time Linux has also proven useful in ways no one ever dreamed of at the
start. Rostedt reminiscenced, "Back in 2005, I got a real-time bug report, and
I sent a patch and said, 'Hey, here's the fix. Can you apply it?' And the guy's
like, 'I don't know what I'm doing.' I replied, 'Wait, aren't you a kernel
developer?' He replied, 'I'm a guitarist.'"
It turned out he was using the early real-time patches because he was using
JACK, the sound server for low-latency audio connections. He was using it
because, like most musicians, he was too broke to buy high-end gear so, Rostedt
continued, "he got a cheap laptop, with Linux and JACK, because with the
real-time patch it would do good recording instead of skipping when the hard
drive was writing."
It turns out that a lot of musicians were early real-time Linux users because
it let them produce high-quality recordings on the cheap. Who knew? Other
real-time Linux features that has slipped into the mainline kernel over the
years include:
What took Real-Time Linux so long?
So, why is Real-Time Linux only now completely blessed in the kernel? "We
actually would not push something up unless we thought it was ready," Rostedt
explained. "Almost everything was usually rewritten at least three times before
it went into mainline because we had such a high bar for what would go in."
In addition, the path to the mainline wasn't just about technical challenges.
Politics and perception also played a role. "In the beginning, we couldn't even
mention real-time," Rostedt recalled. "Everyone said, 'Oh, we don't care about
real-time.'"
Another problem was money. For many years funding for real-time Linux was
erratic. In 2015, the Linux Foundation established the Real-Time Linux (RTL)
collaborative project to coordinate efforts around mainlining PREEMPT_RT.
The final hurdle for full integration was reworking the kernel's print_k
function, a critical debugging tool dating back to 1991. Torvalds was
particularly protective of print_k --He wrote the original code and still uses
it for debugging. However, print_k also puts a hard delay in a Linux program
whenever it's called. That kind of slowdown is unacceptable in real-time
systems.
Rostedt explained: "Print_k has a thousand hacks to handle a thousand different
situations. Whenever we modified print_k to do something, it would break one of
these cases. The thing about print_k that's great about debugging is you can
know exactly where you were when a process crashed. When I would be hammering
the system really, really hard, and the latency was mostly around maybe 30
microseconds, and then suddenly it would jump to five milliseconds." That delay
was the print_k message.
After much work, many heated discussions, and several rejected proposals, a
compromise was reached earlier this year. Torvalds is happy, the real-time
Linux developers are happy, priint_K users are happy, and, at long last,
real-time Linux is real.
After two decades of development, the Linux real-time patch finally has been
merged into the mainline kernel. This milestone marks the culmination of years
of work by kernel developers to bring deterministic, low-latency performance to
Linux.
With it, the Linux kernel is fully preemptible, which enables it to respond to
events within microseconds. This capability is crucial for applications that
require precise timing, such as industrial control systems, robotics, and audio
production.
With the merging of the real-time patch, Linux is now poised to be a serious
player in the RTOS world. This is a victory not just for real-time
manufacturers but for all Linux users.
--
------------------------------
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