This comic was published less than ten years ago, and it's wild how obsolete it is
xkcd.com
We can get a computer to tag the birds, answer questions about them, and generate new pictures of them.
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We can get a computer to tag the birds, answer questions about them, and generate new pictures of them.
I remember this one. It seems as spot on now as it was then, IMO. It's not trying to say that object detection is magic or impossible, since it was totally possible then as well. It just requires a dedicated team + time + money to pay them, which is what this comic was trying to express. It is true there are more off-the-shelf software available for newer programmers now than there was before, so dev time is shorter, but that's more just degrees of comfort / budget as opposed to anything fundamentally different.
It could have been the other way around if global positioning systems were either not developed or used only by the military. In that case, detecting scenery of a park could be easier than trying to figure out the position on the map.
Or it could just be that maps data are not shared. You'll need to hire boats and hire people to go and draw the map.
That's true, even if the specific example doesn't hold, the core concept does. If I needed to implement a bird detector today, I'd make an API call to AWS Rekognition or an equivalent service. It would take me a day or two to learn the API and then maybe 4 hours to actually implement. But if you asked me to implement a bird species detector, I'm pretty sure there is no off the shelf API capable of that, and I would indeed need months or years.