Almost everything that’s easy for the superrich and not for the middle-class is due to human resource scarcity, or “just cost, but in a way that is non-scalable in the underlying non-monetary costs), not just tech availability. Some of the big ones:
not wasting effort on housekeeping, cooking, cleaning, etc. Employing fully-functioning humans to do this is non-scalable—both in human cost and in space cost (room in the home for them to work efficiently without being in the employer’s way), general-purpose androids are a long way off yet.
sufficient privacy in travel/public to be able to chat with an assistant without bothering others.
travel—the environmental cost and waste of valuable real-estate (including airline terminal capacity) are the main blockers for “normal people” to travel like the very rich.
One topic I’m surprised has yet to be solved: discreet (usable on a crowded train without bothering others) hands-free inputs for phones. Throat Mics have been promised forever, but never worked well enough for most people. This isn’t exactly a tech that the rich have today—they just use “real privacy” instead—they don’t ride crowded trains. But it would give some of the productivity and convenience of private transport to the masses.
Almost everything that’s easy for the superrich and not for the middle-class is due to human resource scarcity, or “just cost, but in a way that is non-scalable in the underlying non-monetary costs), not just tech availability. Some of the big ones:
not wasting effort on housekeeping, cooking, cleaning, etc. Employing fully-functioning humans to do this is non-scalable—both in human cost and in space cost (room in the home for them to work efficiently without being in the employer’s way), general-purpose androids are a long way off yet.
sufficient privacy in travel/public to be able to chat with an assistant without bothering others.
travel—the environmental cost and waste of valuable real-estate (including airline terminal capacity) are the main blockers for “normal people” to travel like the very rich.
One topic I’m surprised has yet to be solved: discreet (usable on a crowded train without bothering others) hands-free inputs for phones. Throat Mics have been promised forever, but never worked well enough for most people. This isn’t exactly a tech that the rich have today—they just use “real privacy” instead—they don’t ride crowded trains. But it would give some of the productivity and convenience of private transport to the masses.