Statistician interested in/curious about machine learning work.

I'm almost finishing up my post grad in statistics and thinking of work options a little more. One of where I'm interested in is machine learning and I have some of questions:

1. Does it make sense to dive into machine learning?
2. What are the opportunities out there, in comparison to say clinical work? Say, how is progress in career and so fort.
3. Where to start learning more in-depth? I'm proficient with R and SAS. I'm reading posts here that mostly involves other languages/programs used.

Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!