[Animats]

> They make it easier to get closer to state of the art performace with less

Which gets us, for example, cost-effective robotic weeding, and sorting of recyclables. When each sensor only needs about a smartphone's worth of processing capacity, and cameras are cheap, they can be applied in bulk to mundane tasks.

[ska]

Sure, there are applications where it is a real benefit. Typically (like your examples) where we can manipulate the environment to work around the limitations of the technology. This is a good thing! When the tech gets cheap, it’s easier to apply more broadly.

However it doesn’t really speak to your contention. This is an example of doing less than state of the art perception for much cheaper, but to meet your goal (5 years or otherwise) we need to significantly improve the state of the art.