Rainbows End

Ubiquitous augmented reality, wearable computing, and an intelligence nobody can identify.

Robert Gu, a celebrated poet cured of Alzheimer's, is sent back to high school in his seventies because everything he was good at is now worthless. Everyone else works in belief circles and shreds of contract labour, assembled and dissolved by the hour.

Obsolescence — The work goes, and standing goes with it.

The most plausible near-future workplace in the catalogue, and the only work here where the answer to obsolescence is compulsory retraining rather than despair. Vinge is unusually clear-eyed that the retraining mostly does not take.