Machine Learning leverages a lot of statistical tools from the 1960s. I think ML is amazing because we now have the computational power to run the computationally hungry stats algorithms from the 1960s. I think ML is gaining traction not because of something inherently good about ML (even though it's great), but because of an arms race among the FANG (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google) companies in the valley. Everyone now wants to have the next best ML tool. So there's an escalation in development. When I joined the workforce, regression was a big thing and Andrew Ng was God's prophet. Now we have ANN and CNN that process images from Lidars on self-driving cars. Andrew Ng is still big by the way. But now there are so many young players. They're blasting us oldies out of the water.