Why causal inference?

Currently, I am taking the course MATH 888 which is about causal inference. My first interest for causal inference comes from the well-known saying: Association does not mean causality. While machine learning algorithms are much better than humans at parsing out small patterns in massive data sets, they struggle to comprehend these minor causal relationships. I hope to learn about causal inference in this course and then try to use causal inference to improve machine learning algorithms.