What's worse is that this approach seems to be a dead end, in the sense that it is only useful for pattern recognition, which can substitute for decision making only for extremely simple processes (absent a quantum leap in a range of technologies), and even then those kinds of applications are notoriously difficult to develop and maintain.
I look forward to the enormous benefits we will get from machine learning, as we are already seeing, but again, overselling it won't do us any good.