What Are You Using Your Datasets Actually For?

Hi, my apologies for possibly asking the wrong questions here. I am a total newbie to all things machine learning, have just discovered kaggle and such and I’m a bit stuck with a silly question: I’ve discovered like a million different datasets on there, but I’m just wondering how people are putting these sets to good use. For instance there’s a big dataset about the Titanic. I can’t fathom a realistic use case where this dataset would prove to be useful. I guess I don’t understand just yet where the ‘machine learning’ aspect in datasets like these come into play. What is it exactly you are predicting with these?

Can somebody please enlighten me what I’m obviously missing here? I really want to know.

Thank you