Accelerando by Charles Stross is a great one. The beginning to mid-book concepts of singularity gone wild are mind-blowing on their own… And then it explores “what would happen a few hundred years after that?” A few times.
Concepts that stuck with me are:
all the AI assisted devices helping you through your day eventually running without much of your input, only needing a human to justify being on: When the protagonists interface gets stolen the street-thief ends up closing his business deals, helpless to all the guidance in his head. Meanwhile the protagonist has an existential meltdown having only his brain to think with.
Economics 2.0: AI markets dominate the earth in search of customers to satisfy. Governments are overrun but poverty no longer exists. People are mixed on whether it is utopia or dystopia.
Father in the future: Mass=computation, so entire solar systems become giant thinking machines. But they are stuck in their local space-time, faced with having to shed mass and get dumber to move. Only smaller intelligences can travel, but they risk being gobbled up as more mass if the system they travel to doesn’t care about communicating with the rest of the galaxy.
Father in the future: the universe is a simulation, but through singularities there are simulations that can be reached from within the simulation. One AI has figured out how to send a message back from another simulation, but it means sending a copy of itself to a potentially eternal hell to check it out first.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html.
Also available from your friendly neighborhood mega corporate sales site.
Battle beyond the stars did it 43 years ago, so why not?
Safe to say a lot of the new Disney Star wars stuff is basically seven samurai in space
But hey, the original 7 were technically in space… We’re all in space Morty, literally everything is in space!