How can volunteers supplement the work of the government and should they be expected to? When it comes to solving public problems, there are always too much bureaucracy in the government. Therefore, it is common now that we have many volunteers in the NGOs to supplement the work of almost all the ministries. However, it is difficult to tell how far it should go and what pros and cons it may bring. In Italy, a secret group called “Gap” keeps repairing public facilities when their local government fail to do this for the reason of budget cuts. We can find that the tasks volunteers are doing are mostly trying to solve a problem which the government is not able to solve perhaps due to the shortage of time, labour or budget, or they just don’t notice the problem. Volunteers are more flexible and effective than the government and these spontaneous works also strengthen community identity for people, but meanwhile, volunteer works somehow are not easy to manage and may lose control if they are not managed well. If volunteer work has the power to accomplish something good, it can also be rigged to do something evil or harmful. On the other hand, this issue also matters what we expect for the government. The debate of Big Government and Limited Government continues nowadays. Nonetheless, those volunteer works and little actions still make our world better. Government and volunteers in NGOs could somehow cooperate to optimise the results.

It would be better for the world if we were to let the majority of languages die out. According to Wikipedia, there are more than 5,000 languages in the world, not to mention those dialects and body languages. Let's assume that if we eliminated the majority of languages and only maintained those major languages such as English, what kind of world would it be? There would be no more difficulties to communicate with foreigners. We would first time have a chance to let our information, new technologies and ideas quickly reach anywhere without the need of translation, which might bring the most significant improvement and development than any moment in our history. Does it sound great? Perhaps not as good as we imagine. Some people might argue that language is just a tool to communicate. The value of a minority language is diminished as people abandon it. While referring to researches, languages somehow can represent cultural diversity. The language we use shapes the way we see the world, describe our experiences and express our feelings. Meanwhile, the way we live and our surroundings will also conversely create our language. Language is the boundary of our world, which means if something isn't in one's language, it does not exist in his or her world either. Here is an example, for Mandarin speaking people might notice that Chinese words for phone and giraffe actually mean "electronic speaking"(電話) and "the deer with the long neck"(長頸鹿) because those things were not introduced or not existed in Asia before. In some indigenous tribes, we would probably not find vocabularies to indicate mobile phone or computer, but instead we will find some specific words to describe the intricacies of different natural phenomena, weathers or even some intangible ideas, which we cannot find any equivalent or similar words in English. This is why language matters to cultural diversity. Back to our question, would it bring us a better world if we had fewer languages? It's hard to conclude. However, due to the influence of the globalization, language diversity wanes now. The anthropologist Levi Strauss, who spent many years living in those tribes in South America to record their cultures and languages, once said that he wished he could back to 50 years ago, then he would be able to see and document those lost Indian cultures. If we don't find an apt way to intervene or do something to protect those endangered languages in time, we will definitely regret losing the chance to observe some amazing and fantastic things that we haven't known yet.

Benefits and Dangers of Artificial Intelligence With algorithms and machine learning, the development of AI has been drastically improved. The application of AI is quite wide. We use AI to do our drudgery and also help us to complete some sophisticated works such as surgery or even driving. This technology is absolutely a new step for us, which will probably change the way we live. Although AI can do better than humans in many aspects, it also has some potential risks and also brings some issues in morality and legality. AI can improve our lives and the biggest impact will come when everyone is able to access it. The way we manage AI will definitely be relevant to our future. We human beings sometimes make decisions with our intuition or emotion, which can cause serious consequences. Due to this, AI can help us to judge the situation and make the right decision. But, the question is how reliable is it? AI is still a developing technology so it might still make mistakes. Before it matures, we should not totally rely on it. Another issue is that AI can only learn things from humans' experiences and algorithms. It might learn some defects from us such as gender discrimination or our avarice. The AI now we use is only “narrow AI”, which means it can only learn to do one thing instead of multitasking and feeling as a real human. We can invent Alpha Go to beat the best chess player in the world, but it knows nothing about cooking. If we really invented “general AI”, it would definitely bring more sophisticated problems. First of all, it will raise a dilemma of morality. Should human-kind robots have human rights? Other interesting discussions are what will they do to the world? According to Richard Dawkins and his famous book The Selfish Gene, all animals including humans are just living machines controlled by genes and are motivated by the transmission of genes and memes. Without any genes inside, what will be their purpose, their desire and their motivation of existing for those human-kind robots? Are they going to enslave us or just simply destroy us because we are no longer useful to them? This might be way beyond our imagination. The continuous development of AI brings many discussions for us. We should be aware of the dangers of AI while enjoying many benefits from it. Governments and societies should make the system and establish the laws to manage the AI and prevent the risks before we lose control.