I do think machine learning will become more mainstream, like the saying "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement". Even so, if

I do think machine learning will become more mainstream, like the saying "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement". Even so, if statements tend to be written by humans, compartmentalised into functions/modules/methods/etc. and plugged together to form whole systems. Microsoft software (presumably) isn't one huge `if/elif/elif/...` in a single `while` loop, even though that would suffice in theory. Likewise, I imagine Google's software isn't one giant formula, conditioned on inputs and sampled for outputs. Although many of their user-facing applications do contain a black box of this form (e.g. for translation, text-to-speech, etc.), they're only used in very narrow, well-defined tasks, and are surrounded by a huge amount of "normal" code.