— From The Master Algorithm – How the Quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake our world by Pedro Domingos P. 13
Businesses look at data as a strategic asset: What data do I have that my competitors don’t? How can I take advantage of it? What data do my competitors have that I don’t?
In the same way that a bank without databases can’t compete with a bank that has them, a company without machine learning can’t keep up with one that uses it. While the first company’s experts write a thousand rules to predict what its customers want, the second company’s algorithms learn billions of rules, a whole set of them for each individual customer. It’s about as fair as spears against machine guns. Machine learning is a cool technology, but that’s not why businesses embrace it. They embrace it because they have no choice.”