Biological animals are amazingly good at crude statistical approximations. That's how we perform the vast majority of tasks - we make educated guesses that are

Biological animals are amazingly good at crude statistical approximations. That's how we perform the vast majority of tasks - we make educated guesses that are reasonably close, then correct those guesses as new information becomes available. Computers have historically been very good at getting exact answers to simple problems, but very bad at approximating a solution to more complex problems. Computers that can interact with the real world are computers that can make quick, reasonably accurate guesses based on incomplete information. Hugely important tasks like speech recognition and autonomous driving are practically impossible without using approximate statistical methods. Machine learning is the key framework that allows us to attack those real-world problems.