From Blade Runner to I.Robot, to Transformers, Hollywood's robots-take-control genre has long profited from fears surrounding artificial intelligence's future role in society. But it's looking like, at this particular juncture, AI is more likely to determine what life insurance or hiking boots people might buy than whether cyborgs or humans will control the world. No worthwhile data management platform or analytics solution emerges today without touting its machine learning capabilities and powers of predictive analytics. But machine learning's roots are not foreign to business people. Delivering a primer on the topic at a client conference, SAS Manager of Data Science Technologies Wayne Thompson noted that the main difference between statistics and machine learning is that "statistics focuses more on inferential analysis or hypothesis testing to make predictions about a larger population than the sample represents. Machine learning uses massive amounts of observational data and, as a branch of artificial intelligence, focuses on automation."