Technology that actually works today

Yes. Modern robot vacuums map your home, avoid obstacles, mop, empty themselves and run for weeks without attention. They still cannot pick up the clutter first, and stairs remain their nemesis.

Yes, easily, from a very short sample — which is precisely the problem. Voice cloning is cheap, fast and convincing enough for audiobooks, dubbing and accessibility, and equally convincing to a relative receiving a scam call.

Yes, and it is genuinely good. Phones, earbuds and some glasses translate spoken conversation with a second or two of lag across major language pairs. It is excellent for travel and everyday chat, and still risky for legal, medical or contractual conversations.

Yes, mostly. Consumer phones and cheap call-screening services will pick up, transcribe and hold a short conversation with a caller, and they handle spam and simple appointment calls well. Anything nuanced — an emotional caller, a complex booking, a call that needs your judgement — still gets handed back to you.

Close. Assistants triage, summarise, draft in your voice and handle scheduling well enough that many people no longer read every message. Sending important replies unsupervised is still a bad idea, and quality drops on unfamiliar threads.

Very nearly. Low-earth-orbit satellite broadband delivers genuinely fast, low-latency connectivity almost everywhere, including at sea and in the air. Cost, terminal size and a handful of restricted countries are the remaining gaps.

It can write most of it, but shipping is still a human responsibility. Coding agents build features, fix bugs and open pull requests unaided, and teams genuinely rely on them. Architecture decisions, subtle security issues and long-lived maintenance still need engineers in the loop.

Yes for practice, explanation and patient repetition — with adult oversight. AI tutors adapt to a pupil's level and never tire. They are weaker at motivation, assessment integrity and knowing when a child is quietly disengaging.

It can remember a lot, not everything. Mainstream assistants now keep persistent memory of your preferences, projects and past conversations, and it noticeably improves them. Recall is still selective, occasionally wrong, and confined to whichever assistant you told.

For small, conventional apps, genuinely yes — a non-developer can now describe a tool and get something deployed that works. The gap appears later: security review, awkward edge cases, data modelling and the unglamorous maintenance that decides whether software survives its first hundred users.

For short clips, adverts and b-roll, yes — and it is already in commercial use. Sustained narrative video with consistent characters, dialogue and continuity across minutes remains difficult and needs heavy human editing.

It can run the routine layer. Scheduling, invoicing chase-ups, customer replies, bookkeeping categorisation and marketing drafts are all realistically automatable now. Judgement calls, exceptions and anything with legal weight still need an owner.

Partially, and only for specific things. Wearables have credible, regulator-cleared features for irregular heart rhythm, sleep apnoea signals and fall detection. Broad early warning of infection or disease is research-grade signal, not diagnosis.