>It's like comparing a smartphone camera to a fax machine.
I'm not sure this is a great comparison: smartphones with their cameras have, in practice, absolutely made fax machines (and most flatbed scanners) completely obsolete. People use smartphone cameras all the time to take photos of documents. I've read Apple even has an iPhone function that automatically creates PDFs out of photographed documents; there's surely other apps that do the same. By contrast, no one except dinosaurs still use fax machines.
In theory, specialized, task-specific robots in a robotics facility would be superior in performance to any kind of general-purpose robot for sorting tasks in a recycling center, and research on general-purpose robots can be applied to improving specialized robots. But there is no corresponding case for fax machines; they're truly dead and obsolete.
I'm not sure this is a great comparison: smartphones with their cameras have, in practice, absolutely made fax machines (and most flatbed scanners) completely obsolete. People use smartphone cameras all the time to take photos of documents. I've read Apple even has an iPhone function that automatically creates PDFs out of photographed documents; there's surely other apps that do the same. By contrast, no one except dinosaurs still use fax machines.
In theory, specialized, task-specific robots in a robotics facility would be superior in performance to any kind of general-purpose robot for sorting tasks in a recycling center, and research on general-purpose robots can be applied to improving specialized robots. But there is no corresponding case for fax machines; they're truly dead and obsolete.