A mystery in the machine - OECD Observer

You may not know it, but machine learning is all around you. When you type a query into a search engine, it's how the engine figures out which results to show you–and which ads. When you read your email, you don't see most of the spam because machine learning has filtered it out. Go to Amazon to buy a book or Netflix to watch a video, and a machine-learning system helpfully recommends some others you might like. Facebook uses machine learning to decide which updates to show you, and Twitter does the same for tweets.