Google says robots are going to be bigger than search

Machine learning is the hot new thing in Silicon Valley. In an interview with the Times, Google cloud executive Urs Hölzle predicted that the business of renting out machine learning capabilities will one day overtake the company's advertising revenue. To put that in perspective, search ads made Google an eye-popping 16.4 billion in profits in 2015. Machine learning is a branch of computer science where algorithms can train themselves in pattern recognition. Crucially, it doesn't require a programmer to orient the algorithm to what works or doesn't work in a given domain -- it can learn on its own.