You are driving behind a semi on an open highway, wanting to pass but unable to see around the 18 wheeler. Suddenly the back-end of the semi becomes a huge television screen showing you the road in front of the semi.  Like a miracle, it suddenly turns the semi into a rolling monitor that shows whether or not it’s clear to pass.

Cool, huh? It’s only one of everyday miracles that come at us like a Randy Johnson fastball almost every day of the week.

Can Artificial Intelligence Diagnose Cancer?

A team at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore is developing a tumor-detecting algorithm for detecting pancreatic cancer. But first, they have to train computers to distinguish between organs.

The above link is another miracle that popped up on my feed today. Pancreatic cancer is a deadly son of a gun. I have had several friends die slow and painful deaths because of this disease. Good people who could have lived longer more fruitful lives had this little miracle come along a few years sooner. I read recently of nanobots disguised to hide from disease within the patient’s blood system, until just the right moment when the bot comes to life and destroys the disease in the targeted area only, leaving healthy cells undisturbed.

The miracles just keep on coming.

AI Detects Skin Cancer More Accurately than Expert Dermatologists

How about the fact that AI and robotics can and will produce medical field assistants that can detect disease from within a person’s body, then correct it, perhaps with robot-assisted surgeries. Then another AI-assisted doctor visit detects a skin anomaly that may be cancerous. There are miracle machines now, that can now more  accurately diagnose what your skin anomaly is than a human doctor can. And then your human doctor may use a robotic assistant to remove the potential problem.

We’re not quite at the Star Trek level of medicine where Dr. McCoy runs his Tricorder over the patient’s frame and it diagnoses all of the internal and external problems the patient may have, but we are getting close. Now we are bordering on the Cyborg era.

Growing the parts you need is quite possible now that stem cell research has unlocked to many secrets to re-growing certain organs and other human medical needs. We have learned how to fuse metal and living tissue to create working joints and appendages, to go along with fully robotic arms and legs.

I can say that the age of AI has been difficult for me to wrap my head around. Besides not really understanding how it accomplishes what it does, I also wrestle with the changes in our society. Changes that shows me that in some ways, we are actually becoming the futuristic mix and match world of robots, cyborgs, and humans, with all the downside problems that we’ve feared for decades from movies and sci-fi novels. On top of that, these advancements are now competing to be part of my existence! Alexa wants to help me understand things. Waymo wants to help pick me and deliver me to my destination.. Dr. Robot wants to help repair my knee and wipeout the nasty disease hiding in my colon. And Google wants to help coordinate all this help.

So all in all, we are making progress. This progress becomes more and more like actual “miracles” everyday.