I love science fiction, and even if you don't and just like fiction thrillers, I'd highly recommend the books Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez.
It's hard to go too deeply into why without at least some spoilers, so if all you need is a recommendation, you probably should just go buy the book or audiobook if you want to maintain the surprises completely.
What really struck me about these books is that it painted a vivid picture of our near future, which in some ways may seem dystopian and in other ways might be seen as optimistic, and seems to me there is a high chance of it being in our future. What made it seem so real to me that even though it would be classified as science fiction, as best I could tell, everything that happens in it does not require any technology that doesn't already exist.
The story starts off with a rich computer programmer dies, who was the author of a popular massively multiplayer game. Strange things start happening soon afterwards. Police respond to some disturbances at his house, and they encounter a truck (a Hummer if I recall correctly) that appears to have no driver and is "guarding" the house.
What slowly unfolds is that the programmer deployed an autonomous program (daemon, which is a word that in computer lingo just means a computer program that runs on its own) that was triggered after his death, and it ends up acting a lot like a massively multiplayer game, but set in the real world. The program acts at least somewhat intelligent--and one of maybe the only pieces that didn't exist when the books were written is our current AI, because the program acts intelligent. But even at the time, I thought to myself, a smart game programmer could do this. Set out conditions and quests for people and everything else that happens, that could be done.
And so the events continue to unfold, with the program slowly taking over the world. It gives quests to people, telling them what it wants them to do. It rewards them when they comply, with money, resources, and new capabilities, just like in a game. It threatens them with punishment and carries it out when they don't. It hacks into computers at banks and other companies, blackmailing their IT staff when necessary, and steals money. It uses the money to hire lawyers, and even to design and manufacture new types of weapons, like drones that drop spikes from the sky, and armed self-driving motorcycles.
I couldn't help but feel that this was not only a possible future, but a likely one. Why WOULDN'T someone do this? And how could we stop them if they did?
Now that we have even our current generation of AI, it seems even more likely. The explosion of drone technology is another step down that path.
As I alluded to at the start, the end of the story might be seen as a positive one, depending on your point of view, but I won't spoil that. If you want to understand where we might be headed technologically and as a society, and this sounds like your kind of story, check it out.
