Personally I view machine learning as `data driven AI', in particular the attempt to replicate aspects of human perceptual and cognitive abilities.
Answerby David Barber, machine learning researcher: AI, bayesian reasoning, deep learning, on Quora.
Personally I view machine learning as `data driven AI', in particular the attempt to replicate aspects of human perceptual and cognitive abilities. The ML approach is based on measurable performance on real problems. I'm not sure about which world problems might be solved by such an approach.
Certainly the tools that ML and related fields have produced recently have made great progress in for example visual object recognition, speech recognition and language understanding. I don't know if these are `world problems' as such, but I'd like to think that machine learning will help with the organisation and search of knowledge.