NotABonobo

Mine is Roadside Picnic. I wasn't even that into the adventure part of the story... but once I hit the speech that explains the book's title, and the point of the book landed, it really stuck with me.

Every time I see a dead animal on the side of the road, or a some ants inspecting stray drops in an empty soda can, or a mouse caught in a trap, or pretty much any situation where animals are having a terrible experience due to something humans built as a minor convenience or left lying around as trash, I think "Roadside Picnic." And I imagine the point of view of the animal encountering bizarre alien artifacts they can't and could never understand, mostly encountering horrible deaths but som

The story was about a character seeing AI increasingly take over jobs in America, and over time humans could no longer afford houses and were collected into giant buildings where they were given meaningless low-income busywork jobs created by machines to cover the concept of a "job that pays money," and AI covered all the actual work that was once done by humans. The only humans who escape this fate are a handful of trillionaires who own the AI.

The character has a mysterious uncle or something who arranges an escape and passage to Australia, which he'd heard was a hellhole... but he gets there and finds that it's a paradise. They have all the same technology but they're using it completely