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How an AI Scientist Turned Her Breast Cancer Diagnosis Into a Tool to Save Lives

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When artificial intelligence researcher Regina Barzilay was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, she says she was struck by immediate questions: "Am I going to survive? What's going to happen to my son?" But soon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist began asking a broader one: Why couldn't her cancer have been diagnosed earlier? Barzilay's quest to find an answer would lead to a remarkable result: the development of an AI-based system for early detection of breast cancer, with the ability to predict whether a patient is likely to develop the disease in the next five years. A technology that had not yet penetrated the hospital setting now has the potential to save many thousands of lives each year.


Could the Rise of Artificial Intelligence Put Truckers' Jobs in Peril?

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Self-driving trucks may have once seemed like a futuristic vision. But in recent years, they've begun taking to the road -- and their implications for the labor market, and long-haul truck drivers in particular, could be enormous. In the above excerpt from the new FRONTLINE documentary In the Age of AI, meet the young CEO of a self-driving truck company whose vehicles are already delivering freight from California to Arizona; an independent trucker and his wife whose livelihood could be threatened by the new tech; and a sociologist and author who's been studying the forces reshaping the trucking industry. Among them: the rise in automation, some forms of which are powered by AI -- including self-driving trucks. "The trucking industry is $740 billion a year … in many of these operations, labor's a third of that cost," Steve Viscelli, author of The Big Rig, tells FRONTLINE in the above excerpt from the film.