Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that allows systems to learn and improve automatically through experience. Arthur Samuel coined the term "machine learning" in 1959. Machine learning has advantages like identifying patterns in large datasets, improving continuously over time, and handling multidimensional data autonomously. However, it also has disadvantages such as requiring large, high-quality datasets and time to train accurately while being susceptible to errors from incomplete training data. Machine learning has applications in virtual assistants, surveillance, search results, and email/malware filtering.