This xkcd cartoon by Scott Munro is open source, so I can hotlink the image directly. But if you go to the source, https://xkcd.com/1838/, be sure to hover over the image for a second punch line.
The cartoon reads:
This is your machine learning system?
Yup! You pour the data into this big pile of linear algebra, then collect the answers on the other side.
What if the answers are wrong?
Just stir the pile until they start looking right.
When you hover over the image, you get this caption:
The pile gets soaked with data and starts to get mushy over time, so it’s technically recurrent.