And it did so specifically because of the hard work of professional high-caliber research backed by huge amounts of industry funding. Munroe knew exactly what he was talking about.
We had decent enough image classification for this task a few years before this comic. While the sentiment is true the example in it had already been solved.
Here's the ImageNet recognition challenge results from 2011[1]. Bird is actually one of the easier categories they they call out, but still calling it 'solved' is a bit of an exaggeration.
The winning model is from Xerox Research Center Europe.
Well I saw plenty of commercial software failing at this kind of thing even a few years ago, when presented with real-world pictures. Seems to be solved now, though.
