Before machine learning, human taught computers to do things with computer programs that explained, step-by-step, what the computer should do.
Computers could only perform conscious-thinking tasks.Unconscious-thinking tasks were beyond the reach of computers since they could not be programmed.
With machine learning, the computer use a large amount of data to work out by itself how to best guess the solution to a particular problem.
Thanks to exponential advances in computing, power and access to preposterous amounts of data, computers trained by machine learning routinely achieve human-level performance on unconscious-thinking tasks – like recognizing handwriting, speech or bone breaks in X-ray images. One game-changing application of machine learning is machine translation.
