Comment by zackchase

While I don't take exception with the word machine learning (it's reasonably well defined), I agree with most of the points here. Some are grossly exaggerated (e.g. needing petabytes of data to do machine learning). In my research on medical time series, we get strong results with a few thousand examples (megabytes). Same for natural language datasets which are modestly sized. But yes, absolutely agree that function approximation for supervised learning and some kind of artificial consciousness as portrayed in the media are very far apart.