Speaking as a part timer on Brain who's not a machine learning person, I've found and believe that MI just opens up more opportunities for good programmers. There are a ton of problems out there that we couldn't solve well with computers without MI, and so didn't even attempt. Now we can attempt them, and they're both fun and hard.

(I wrote a longer-form answer to a very similar question a few months ago: http://da-data.blogspot.com/2016/05/dont-quit-that-programmi... )