Teachers of Humans, Teachers of Machines

Machine Learning (ML) is an emerging discipline with roots in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, engineering, computer science, and statistics. It seeks to build computer programs automatically, not by human guidance, but by learning from data. Many view the rapid advance of this transformational field as a paradigm shift; in the popular media, ML is often compared to the development of the internet or the industrial revolution. These broad claims may be attributed to the reach of the field: many tasks with social or economic importance, across myriad domains, may be framed as prediction problems. ML seeks to remove the human from prediction to create systems that are more systematic, more accurate, and more affordable. This chapter explores these themes.