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> Not everything in the world has to be prescriptive.

Unfortunately we're still on the rise of the current hype cycle around Machine Learning, and prescriptive solutions are precisely what nearly every company who use the phrase "machine learning" are promising.

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I think recasting prescription from "so you should" to "and here are the inferences now available" can be reasonable. The issue is when the inferences from discovered patterns are invalid and implicit - as per predictive policing or follow about ads on the web. An inference such as "this is almost certainly the component that is causing the most faults and will cost the least to replace" is reasonable and valid to me, and so a machine offering it would be valuable.

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