I am interested in exploring the subject of Machine Learning. I would like to know its present and future application. I am a mechanical engineer and would like to say that I do not have any knowledge in software programming. However I am open to learn it. What are the topics I need to understand, as a pre-requisite, to learn the subject of Machine Learning. A few that I know are Probability, Statistics, Programming.

Presently Machine learning in the majority of the companies is used for optimisation and data driven solutions to existing business. ML industry relies on de facto algorithms like Linear regression, logistic regression to solve those problems. As you mentioned knowledge of probability and statics is sufficient for this. One can rely on R or SAS to accomplish tasks But Ai driven companies like Facebook, Google etc are using and extending the potential of Machine Learning. Google is using Machine learning in most of its products be it spam filter, news classification, google translate, youtube recommendations, Google assistant etc. the list is endless. Such companies are using deep learning a lot which indeed is killing ML itself. Very strong programming concept is required in these companies and language preference depends on product one is working. For prototyping, people use Python libraries a lot like Tensor flow, theano, cafee etc, which later is converted to c++ for production use. I hope I have helped you to refine your understanding of current and future scenario of ML. All the best.. read less