Machine Learning Versus Machine Discovery

Where it applies, it heatedly enables data-rich and knowledge-lean automation of valuable tasks of perception, classification and numeric prediction. Let's consider where learning or discovery best applies -- and why this matters for business. Years ago I was a machine-discovery researcher. Scholarly articles were published in the journal Machine Learning, and presentations were made at Machine Learning conferences, since it seemed that learning and discovery were similar human activities. As a (veteran) entrepreneur, I'm often asked whether a learning approach makes sense for automating some task, which motivated me to pen this piece.