Depending on who you talk to, artificial intelligence (AI) is either the most exciting and transformative technology in our lifetime or the most dangerous and troubling. Science fiction has shaped some of these AI worries; movies like I, Robot, The Matrix and the entire Terminator franchise are built on the notion that machines can become conscious and independent in their thoughts and actions -- an understandably alarming idea. But I think that the casual way we talk about AI in pop culture contributes to unfounded fears about the machines taking over and distracts from valid concerns about privacy. It's helpful to shift this conversation from AI as a whole to the more specific domain of machine learning (ML), and how we can harness its advantages and minimize its drawbacks. Machine Learning is a subset of AI that describes how computer algorithms get better at solving their domain specific problems by leveraging large data sets with which to train themselves.