Machine Learning - where the learning is stored?

When humans learn, it is stored in our memory. We make decisions based on past experience and our learning. When we say a machine learning algorithm learns (for example, e-mail spam, supervised learning in a classification task), I understand we train the algorithm with training data set. When the machine learns, how that learning happens? Does the algorithm generates set of rules that get stored on a storage disk? If so, every time when we run the program, it has to run all the rules before making decision, if so, wouldn’t it be time consuming, if we apply this to self-driving car use case?

Just curious if you have any feedback for this? If this is going to be discussed in the AI for Managers course, I will wait until I get to that topic. As you know, I purchased AI for Managers online option and in the process of learning topic by topic.

Do you have any online webinar for folks taking AI for Managers online class to give a chance for them to talk to you (Sandeep) ? thank you.