Answer: Becoming a doctor or a surgeon is an honorable goal, but it is a long and challenging process, beginning with pursuing a bachelor's degree. The path to being a doctor typically takes a minimum of 12 years AFTER high school, specialties with extensive training periods can take five or more additional years.
Cyber-physical systems are helping firefighters detect and deter fires, improving agricultural practices and enabling scientists to mitigate underwater oil spills. Advances in cyber-physical systems will enable capability, adaptability, scalability, resiliency, safety, security and usability that will far exceed the simple embedded systems of today.
Various virtualization methods create a logical abstraction layer for dealing with the physical hardware. For example, virtual machines enable multiple operating systems to run in the computer, each accessing the hardware via a logic layer rather than direct physical contact. See virtualization and virtual machine.