However, I do spend my days around (often fixing computers for) people who do seem to understand machine learning... and as far as I can tell, we're still in a phase where machine learning functions like a fancy sort of filter... a way of determining if this new piece of data is more like this set of training data or the other set of training data.
While I totally see how that could be super useful in designing business applications, I mean, I could totally use some sort of ML filter to take the boss' words and match them with something I know how to do, or with something you can solve with an existing ML library... and while I can see how something like this could potentially help to replace me, I don't see what it has to do with artificial consciousness.