“Compared to the human brain, machine learning isn’t especially efficient. A child places her finger on the stove, feels pain, and masters for the rest of her life the correlation between the hot metal and her throbbing hand. And she also picks up the word for it: burn. A machine learning program, by contrast, will often require millions or billions of data points to create its statistical models of cause and effect. But for the first time in history, those petabytes of data are now readily available, along with powerful computers to process them. And for many jobs, machine learning proves to be more flexible and nuanced than the traditional programs governed by rules.”