Yes, sure, I could have phrased that better. There are no doubt many possible applications of the idea. The recent headline-grabbing applications of machine learning tend not to be like this.
Though even amongst the recent-headline-grabbing stuff there are some areas that you can improve at by the equivalent of AlphaGo's self-play. Basically, when you have a slow and expensive option to use a weaker version of your system to produce better decisions / smarter data, and then use those to train the system.
