We're now four or five years into the current explosion of machine
learning, and pretty much everyone has heard of it, and every big company
is working on projects around ‘AI’. We know this is a Next Big Thing. I
don't think, though, that we yet have a settled sense of quite what machine
learning means - what it will mean for tech companies or for companies in
the broader economy, how to think structurally about what new things it
could enable, and what important problems it might actually be able to
solve.