If you put water on the stove and heat it up, it will at first just get

hotter and hotter. You may then conclude that heating water results

only in hotter water. But at some points everything changes—the water 【M1】__________

starts to boil, turned from hot liquid into steam. Physicists call this a 【M2】__________

“phase transition”.

Automation, driven by technological progress, has been increasing

inexorably for the past several decades. Two schools of economical 【M3】__________

thinking have for many years been engaged in a debate about the

potential effects of automation on jobs, employment and human

activity: Will new technology spawn on mass unemployment,as the 【M4】__________

robots take jobs away from humans? Or will jobs robots take over release 【M5】__________

or unveil—or even create—demand for new human jobs? The debate has

flared up again recently because technological achievements such as deep 【M6】__________

learning, which recently enabled a Google software program called

AlphaGo to beat Go world champion Lee Sedol, a task considered even

hard than beating the world’s chess champions. 【M7】__________

Ultimately the question boils down to it: Are today’s modern 【M8】__________

technological innovations like those of the past, which made obsolete

the job of buggy maker, but created the job of automobile

manufacturer? Or is there something about today that is marked 【M9】__________

different? Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point highlighted what

he called “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior

cross a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire”. Can we really be 【M10】_________

confident that we are not approaching a tipping point, a phase

transition—that we are not mistaking the trend of technology both

destroying and creating jobs for a law that it will always continue

this way?

【M7】