Sorry, I should have been clearer. I obviously concede that stuff like applying kNN over ginormous datasets to find TV shows people like, or doing some matrix decomposition to correlate ('recognise') objects in photographs, is obviously useful in the trivial sense. It has uses. It wouldn't exist otherwise. I was more thinking on a higher level, about whether it has led to any truly epochal technological advances, which it hasn't.
Machine learning / neural nets also (like I said) get to claim credit for a hell of a lot of things which are just products of colossal advances in hardware – simply of its becoming possible to run statistical methods over very very large '1:1 scale' sample sets – and not due to a specific statistical technique (NN) which is not remotely new and has been heavily researched for about 40-50 years now.
Machine learning / neural nets also (like I said) get to claim credit for a hell of a lot of things which are just products of colossal advances in hardware – simply of its becoming possible to run statistical methods over very very large '1:1 scale' sample sets – and not due to a specific statistical technique (NN) which is not remotely new and has been heavily researched for about 40-50 years now.