Reddit mentions of The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)

Try Fallen Dragon by Hamilton..

Also Snow Crash, which does have another book in it's universe but is stand alone, the other book is Diamond Age Which I also recommend. If you end up liking Stephenson then try Anathem.

I too am a fan of stand alone novels, I wish author weren't pressured to turn everything into a saga.

Lots of people are asking the question "Are you ready for mass unemployment?" But how does someone "get ready?" My solution was to move into software development and hopefully into running my own business on the web some day; but developing software is not for everyone.

This reminds me of "The Diamond Age." http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Age-Bantam-Spectra-Book-ebook/dp/B000FBJCKI/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449699124&sr=1-1&keywords=stephenson+diamond+age

These 3 books are about societies in transition to a post-human society, a post-scarcity society, or something unfathomable:

Blood Music by Greg Bear.

Nexus by Ramez Naam.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.

This book is about designing and training an intelligent machine:

When HARLIE was One by David Gerrold.

related sci-fi reading - "The Diamond Age"

This is a great book from the author of Snowcrash. If you haven't read either, do yourself a favor and pick it up.

Snowcrash was written in 1992 and predicated so much how the Internet works and how it affects our world that it seems more like near-term cyberpunk entertainment written around the early 2000s

I can only imagine that Diamond Age holds similar promise regarding a "replicator's" effect on economy, government, education, and class.