Although I feel squeamish about blowing up pigeons who you have domesticated to help you (not that this is necessarily worse than what occurs in the meat industry, or than any of the things man inflicts on man during war), I really believe that this would have worked. We are only just now beginning to be able to approach animals' visual capabilities using ANNs, and that with much greater power consumption, more complicated supply chains, and less recyclability.

Likewise, given experiments in which rats drive cars (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50167812), and dogs who have learned to use skateboards &etc, I suspect that the self-driving car problem could be solved using trained animals and input devices well adapted to their anatomies. Which, however, would raise the question -- why not just allow children to drive? I digress.

In other stories of animal employment, a baboon once worked as a railway signalman: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_(baboon)

> He was paid twenty cents a day, and half a bottle of beer each week. It is widely reported that in his nine years of employment with the railway company, Jack never made a single mistake.

This all seems absurd to us -- "Jobs involve sitting at desks, pushing buttons on computers, don't they? That's what a 'job' is, right?" -- but I think the box inside which we think is smaller than it used to be.