Wealth is frequently mistaken for success because they often go hand-in-hand. So when I say "look to the wealthy people" I am not giving life advice on attaining success. I simply mean to look at the wealthy people in the world today and consider the fundamental advantages they have. If you're able to distill these advantages and learn how to streamline them and decrease cost with technology, you might want to start picking stitching for the leather on your yacht. Still not following?

Since hindsight is 20/20 let's take a look backward in time and extrapolate.

Not long ago only wealthy people had phones in their cars, they were available around the clock and could get business done while on the move. Now you and a few billion of your closest friends have a super computer while you're in the bathroom. Similarly, only a few years ago, having a luxury sedan at your beck and call 24/7 was only for those who wouldn't waste time to pick up a $100 bill if they dropped it. Now we've got Uber and Lyft in most metropolitan areas on the planet.

You can pick any two points in history and be able to find this pattern emerge. Cars, trains, huge televisions, medical care, air conditioning... the list goes on. Yesterday's unattainable comforts are tomorrow's standard for living.

Smart homes are exciting, but I think there's a bigger one looming in our not-too-distant future. What does every wealthy person have instantly available to them around the clock to take care of anything they need, yet the average person couldn't hope to afford? An assistant. The biggest gain to be realized in a successful instance of this pattern emerging is when technology can scale for next to nothing and replace an otherwise costly human resource.

Interestingly, the biggest problem with this breakthrough might not actually be the technology. I suspect it will be the public perception and acceptance of this technology. An assistant knows every detail of their boss's life. They know their most personal information, they know intimate things, they know where they are the vast majority of the time. Most crucially, a good assistant can piece all of this together and make logical inferences to anticipate the needs of their boss. Therein lies the power of the dedicated assistant.

When this assistant is a person, there is an opportunity to develop a trusting relationship. There is accountability. If something is leaked, you've got a human being to point the finger at and that human being will take responsibility. This doesn't transfer well to the digital realm. When a leak takes place some executive might get fired, but that doesn't repair the personal damage done. You can't easily develop a trusting relationship; instead to fully realize a digital assistant you will need to to relinquish your most intimate information while accepting the associated risk.

Taking this leap will not be easy, and there will be many people who refuse to do it. There are still people who disable location services on their iPhones so they can't realize the immense power in maps or any number of the thousands of location based services.

There will be several options when it comes to how this sensitive information is handed over. This discussion is too nuanced to cover here, but the over-simplified version is that you will have the Apple version where you pay for the service directly or through "costly" hardware, then you'll have the Google version where the services are "free" and the ways in which your data will be used for Google's profit will be detailed in legalese on page 182 of the Terms of Service that we each read so thoroughly. Neither one is right, neither one is wrong, but a choice will have to be made if you decide to opt in at all.

I know three things for certain:

I will be opting in.
I will be willing to pay a modest price for a service I consider worthwhile.
If the depiction of wealthy people in movies is a preview of where we're headed, then I am particularly excited having seen the Iron Man movies.