Coding is also similar in this case, as a mechanical engineer going to be surrounded by various types of machines or working to build those machines with various design and analysis tasks, but the reality is almost all machines are connected to computers and all software to design and analyze your system are on the computers only. So ultimately either learn the computer's language or teach them ours.
Teaching the computer to learn by itself is Machine Learning. Now if I talk about the real-world scenario, all industries want automation in their manufacturing or assembly plants, because it reduces the human effort, increases the efficiency of the system and overall time reduces.
Two definitions of Machine Learning are offered. Arthur Samuel described it as: "the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed." This is an older, informal definition.
Tom Mitchell provides a more modern definition: "A computer program is said to learn from experience E for some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E."
Example: playing checkers.
E = the experience of playing many games of checkers
T = the task of playing checkers.
P = the probability that the program will win the next game.
As a Mechanical Engineer, words like Robots, Automated Machines, Advanced System Analysis fascinates us too much but seems very difficult and the reason is we are not aware of the language of the computer.
Let us see one problem statement of one manufacturing industry according to which "The company wants to automate their 50 Injection Moulding Machines of various capacities and connectivity of those machines to be established with one single system of the production engineer so that he can adjust their usage and change codes according to the need."
Now to solve this problem we are having two options, one person is completely aware of the computer networking and coding systems, but he is not having any knowledge about the products to be manufactured, working of machines and production technologies but on the other hand, the second one is Mechanical Engineer, means having all basics about the manufacturing technologies as well as he is able to communicate with the computers also. The second one is more profitable for the company because he can understand the field problems very clearly.