What are machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)?

- This is a picture of a retina, the inside of your eye. When trained doctors look at this, they can diagnose not only vision problems, but other things like diabetes. To do this, the doctor needs to know what to look for, and they have to have seen hundreds, if not thousands of retinas just like this one for a comparison. And even then, getting that diagnosis right is really tricky. Enter machine learning. It turns out, we can program computers to learn by feeding them huge volumes of data, telling them to find connections in that data. This is what's called deep learning. When scientists did this with retinas, they found that the computers were better at spotting minute changes that may indicate diabetes than their human counterparts, which is extraordinary. Machine learning is the umbrella term for a bunch of different approaches to getting a computer to either find patterns in existing data, create new data to mimic other data, or follow specific paths or behaviors. Basically…