Machine learning allows algorithms to learn through experience, and do things we don’t know how to make programs for.

To Domingos (University of Washington computer scientist Pedro Domingos), machine learning is as big of a breakthrough as personal computers, the internet, or electricity itself.

“There were two stages to the information age,” Domingos says. “One stage is where we had to program computers, and the second stage, which is now beginning, is where computers can program themselves by looking at data.”

Perhaps that’s why Google’s Eric Schmidt says that every big startup over the next five years will have one thing in common: machine learning.

Full article: http://www.techinsider.io/machine-learning-as-important-as-the-internet-2016-3