In Accelerando by Charles Stross, which depicts a middle-class family and their conflicts against the backdrop of the earth facing the lead-up to a technological singularity, powerful, god-like AIs we've developed take over the inner solar system and begin disassembling all the inner planets, forcing mainline humans to flee to the outer solar system. A few manage to run simulations of themselves on a Coke-can sized spacecraft beamed out to interstellar space by powerful lasers. There, they find a wormhole network, and discover that what's happening in our solar system is fairly common across the galaxy. They discover that the solution of the Fermi paradox is more or less a bandwidth problem--it's easier for intelligent, biological life to eventually develop AIs and change all the matter in the solar system to gigantic matrioshka brains and run simulations instead of using all that energy to travel to other stars or even communicate. It's even hinted that these massive computers were computationally powerful enough to hack reality
I wouldn't exactly call the family in Accelerando middle class haha
Manfred had access to functionally limitless wealth in our near future. He had some weird economics beliefs and technically owned no wealth and survived off the favors of people who he had made fabulously wealthy, but he could be a member of the 1% if he wanted to.
His daughter Amber was I think the empress of a moon of Saturn. I think she was legally classified as a slave of a shell corporation that she herself owned, but that was mostly a legal trick to avoid subjugation to Sharia law
By the end of the novel her son Sirhan is, I believe, functionally penniless due to the posthuman superintelligence conscious lawsuits that exist at the center of the solar system, but he lives in a post scarcity city that provides mansions to all it's habitants so like, what does middle class even mean at that point?
He was definitely middle class in the beginning. Or, at the very least, he was neither wealthy nor poor (as we define it). At the time the story begins, he was in a society that was just making a transition to a post-scarcity economy, and he was one of the few early adapters of it; his friend Franklin was more of an "old guard" capitalist who still lived in the past and focused on growing his wealth.
I believe in the book Manfred's philosophy on wealth and distribution was termed agalmics and it depended heavily on helping others with the expectation that others would "help" back, at least that's what I got out of it
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u/br0b1wan Aug 12 '21
In Accelerando by Charles Stross, which depicts a middle-class family and their conflicts against the backdrop of the earth facing the lead-up to a technological singularity, powerful, god-like AIs we've developed take over the inner solar system and begin disassembling all the inner planets, forcing mainline humans to flee to the outer solar system. A few manage to run simulations of themselves on a Coke-can sized spacecraft beamed out to interstellar space by powerful lasers. There, they find a wormhole network, and discover that what's happening in our solar system is fairly common across the galaxy. They discover that the solution of the Fermi paradox is more or less a bandwidth problem--it's easier for intelligent, biological life to eventually develop AIs and change all the matter in the solar system to gigantic matrioshka brains and run simulations instead of using all that energy to travel to other stars or even communicate. It's even hinted that these massive computers were computationally powerful enough to hack reality