Machine learning allows computers to learn from data without being explicitly programmed. The document discusses supervised inductive learning where the goal is to predict an output value given an input. Decision trees are a popular method that represent learned functions as tree structures. The document provides an example of learning a decision tree to predict whether it is a good day for tennis given attributes like temperature and wind. It describes how decision trees are learned by splitting the training data on attributes that provide the most information gain at each step, resulting in a tree that can classify new examples.