What is machine learning?

One area of technology that is helping improve the services that we use on our smartphones, and on the web, is machine learning. Sometimes, the terms machine learning and artificial intelligence get used as synonyms, especially when a big name company wants to talk about its latest innovations, however AI and machine learning are two quite distinct, yet connected, areas of computing. The goals of AI is to create a machine which can mimic a human mind and to do that it needs learning capabilities. However the goal of AI researchers are quite broad and include not only learning, but also knowledge representation, reasoning, and even things like abstract thinking. Machine learning on the other hand is solely focused on writing software which can learn from past experience.