I found Vernor Vinge is spot on. I recommend focusing on recent work. E.g. the Bobiverse (https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse) by Denis E. Taylor is a super easy read that touches on that. He takes a shortcut in early books by capping the progress in US via turning the country into a theocracy and then a bad WWIII that wiped out most of the mankind. Note that I haven't read the latest books, but even the previous ones are full of automation and humans are "ephemerals" - they don't live long. I am recently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of time series. It goes beyond AI and mind uploading, expanding into biotech, the next big deal. With the right understanding of proteins and DNA/RNA, hacking living things is way easier than creating robots, as they self-repair, replicate, feed themselves, recycle things effectively, create ecosystems. The only reason we are not doing it is because our understanding of these mechanisms is very shallow.