You misspelled "birds". Most male birds don't have penises.

So it's basically the same process as making a set of pictures of the horizon scrolling from left to right, and pasting them together where they overlap to create a panorama?

It's very easy to confuse 'being ill' with 'being infectious'. Those are only loosely related. You're generally infectious when the amount of virus particles in your airways is the highest. But influenza symptoms can exist long after you have cleared the virus from your system. The damage the viruses did can linger for days to weeks to years. The post-viral syndrome (now often referred to in the context of COVID-19 as post-COVID) is a real issue for a lot of people.

Why would that piss off anyone in the EU? It's a stupid idea, but it solves all problems.

How? Google needs speech where it knows what is said to train the software. That's most easily done with audiobooks or transcripts conversations, not random people speaking without it written down somewhere.

For years and years we've been helping Google read books by reading scanned words. Now we're helping them read traffic situations.

That leaves me to wonder: what's next? What large machine learning projects needs tons of tagged data that can be delegated to untrained people?

It didn't?

Coronavirus isn't so different from other viruses as some people think. It's just like some of the many we already knew, but mutated in such a way it became easily transmissible and quite deadly. Models of how the virus spreads were already quite accurate, and were quite good at predicting how the virus would infect the world.

I think we learned the most about how countermeasures affect the spread of viruses on an international, national, regional and local level. Much was unclear about the actual effect of lockdowns, limiting group sizes, et cetera. Of course models existed, but they were never tested at such a massive scale.