I believe the last half of your message (ie. a virtual assistant) is going to be really big in the future. It should be able to handle basically any rote tech

I believe the last half of your message (ie. a virtual assistant) is going to be really big in the future. It should be able to handle basically any rote tech interaction for you, from shopping, people screening, service issues, non-personal mails, you name it. If for example the back-end service issue channel on a shop ran a matching protocol then the issue could be logged in fractions of a second, the savings in time for both you and the company in question would be huge. (Of course raising problems if you can't afford your own assistant and now need to call in manually to the 3 human operators that are still employed). Combine that with a physical assistant (robot) that can handle the physical tasks such as bringing the shopping inside and storing it, managing cleaning etc and you're going to have a winning combo.