【推荐1】Musk, Hawking, Gates — the tech giants have redoubled their warnings about how we could destroy ourselves with technology. But they’re not talking about deliberately pushing buttons to trigger disaster. They mean accidentally killing ourselves with something that we invent for our benefit.

It’s a little embarrassing to have to admit that accidental deaths are increasing in a world that our ancestors made safer for hundreds of years. Our grandparents saw the invention of the automobile, the bulldozer (推土机) and so on, and they made them all safer. However, nowadays, we put a smartphone on every hand, and now more than 1000 distraction-related crashes happen on our roads every day. Kids and pets die of heatstroke (中暑) inside cars — we are on track to set a new record for hot car deaths in 2021. We may not have to worry about AI, but our innovations are quietly outpacing our ability.

We place blind trust in complex systems that reveal little about how they work. It seems that we have superhuman abilities, and consumers seem willing to play along. They drive at a speed of 80 mph with a phone and a cup of coffee, and they are proud of their multitasks. Sure, other people on phones are dangerous, but you can smoothly switch your attention and notice when any emergency occurs, right?

When we misjudged a situation in the past, we got immediate feedback. But technology can place the consequences of our missteps at a distance. Delayed reactions, complex chain reactions —these are all part of how technology works. But having adapted to a world of new inventions, we are crazy about driverless cars, seldom stopping to consider what could go wrong later down the road. Worse still, technology is even hacking our feedback system. We get excited when we check our phone while driving. Edith Harbaugh, whose company, Launch Darkly, specializes in the controlled release of new technology into the wild, pointed out that we’re creating a dangerously unbalanced system of actions and rewards: “We are not given ice creams every time we do something safe.”

So it is too late to worry about threatening technology, which is upon us. The modern world is breaking everything we know about staying safe. If we have any hope of staying alive with the rise of the machines, we are going to need to learn to survive the things we have today.

【推荐3】Volunteering During the Coronavirus

The coronavirus pandemic has seriously impacted both nonprofit organizations and their volunteers. It has changed the way volunteers are engaged and supported and the roles they can perform. Some organizations have reduced services while others have increased them; Beth Steinhorn, president of VQ Volunteer Strategies, says she has seen many do both. “People had to switch things up by canceling events but also found creative ways to deliver services in safe ways for staff, volunteers and the communities being served,” she explains.     1     But as states start to reopen, organizations should be considering volunteers as they make plans to resume services, says Steinhorn.

    2     Steinhorn says remote volunteering has been around for decades but the pandemic provided more opportunities to leverage this approach. “For those few organizations that had not been engaging volunteers remotely but who have piloted such engagements as a result of the COVID-19 restrictions, this is a great opportunity to continue making volunteering accessible to a wider array of volunteers so that you can continue to build capacity to deliver mission.”

Secondly, develop online orientations and trainings. If new to presenting orientations and trainings online, Steinhorn suggests focusing first on developing information sessions or orientations that traditionally rely less on interaction. Whether piloting online orientations or diving into training or continuing education, make sure you train yourself or a staff member on how to use technology effectively online for teaching.

Besides, reach out to inactive volunteers.     3     Invite them to trainings, especially if policies have changed, and loop them in on social events like virtual meetings and potlucks. “We need to recognize that all our volunteers may not have been able to engage actively, but they still care very much about the mission.”

Furthermore, develop a response plan and track engagement. It’s not too late to develop a volunteer engagement plan for response and/or reopening. In doing so, consider your pre-pandemic state of engagement and assess your organization’s volunteer engagement assets.     4     Track this data to measure the impact volunteer engagement has had on your response. “Only by tracking impacts and losses are we going to have the data we need to continue to advocate for engagement as a strategy,” she notes.

【推荐2】The stuff (要素) of science fiction has landed on our plates. Meat grown in a lab, instead of inside the body of an animal, has been approved for sale for the first time. The US startup took a biopsy (细胞活组织切片) of cells from a live chicken, bathed them in a nutrient medium and grew them in a bioreactor (生物反应器), where they grew until the meat was harvested.

Cultured meat is eye catching technology. But it is also an over engineered solution to a problem that we can solve by changing our diets. If we simply stopped eating meat, or ate it far less often, then there would be no need for either harmful animal agriculture or meat grown in a lab.

The cultured meat industry rests on a view of human beings as greedy and incapable of change. But the coronavirus pandemic has shown that we are able to make enormous changes to our behaviour when faced with crisis.

The startups growing meat in labs might be motivated by noble intentions: to save animals and save the planet. But giant meat producers such as Cargill and Tyson are already investing heavily in cultured protein. Who knows which companies will run the industry in decades to come.

If we move into a world where eating meat remains normal but killing animals is forbidden, we will become ever more dependent on remote companies with highly specialized technology to meet our basic needs. But we don’t have to. We can just choose to eat less meat. That’s where real power lies-not in using this new technology but in being prepared to change our behaviour.