What The Hell Is Machine Learning And Why Do I Need To Know It?

Turns out, machines can learn. And while that may mean the fall of man, it also means self-driving cars and better Netflix recommendations. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. The implications of that are pretty massive: it means that a developer doesn't need to know, for example, how to program a computer to drive a car. But that developer can use a series of complex algorithms to program the computer to teach itself how to drive a car.