They don't even do statistical analysis. If they did, they would be able to put confidence limits on their classifications at least.
Not necessarily so; sometimes it is just too damn hard to calculate confidence intervals analytically, and/or too computationally-intensive to use surrogate data methods (e.g., bootstrapping). This does not imply that the ML method itself is not statistical.
I also suspect (though I'm not sure) that some ML techniques may indeed allow calculation of confidence intervals.
Agreed that power consumption is a serious issue.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
