what does it mean for a machine to “learn?” How do we quantify something like skill growth when, for humans, learning is a subjective experience?

Question

what does it mean for a machine to “learn?” How do we quantify something like skill growth when, for humans, learning is a subjective experience?

In: 4

Answer 1

Machine learning is a misnomer. The machine isn’t really “learning” in the same way that humans learn things.

Rather, what you do is you feed in a bunch of data and it makes correlations between the data, creating a complicated algorithm that generally gives a more or less correct answer (hopefully).

“Machine learning” is really a programming shortcut when we don’t know how to program something to do something.

There are severe limitations on this, which people try to paper over to make money.

Machine learning is a useful tool but thinking of it as an intelligent process or analogous to human learning isn’t really correct. If you teach a human a concept, they can apply it freely, but the machine isn’t being taught concepts in this way, it’s more like someone trying to observe someone else doing something and then repeating what they saw that worked, but without understanding what they were doing. Sometimes it works and sometimes you end up with cargo cults.