The ultimate goal of machines is to help humans to solve problems.
Such problems range between two extremes: structured problems for which the solution is totally defined (and thus are easily programmed by humans), and random problems for which the solution is completely undefined (and thus cannot be programmed). Problems in the vast middle ground have solutions that cannot be well defined and are, thus, inherently hard to program. Machine Learning is the way to handle this vast middle ground, so that many tedious and difficult hand-coding tasks would be replaced by automatic learning...