I'm imagining a lone genius toiling away at a novel and dying in obscurity, with his work gaining recognition only after his death, à la Herman Melville, except in this future the writing eventually enters the canon by deeply impressing not human but machine readers.
Point being, had Melville continued writing south pacific adventure novels he probably would not be remembered today but might have died a well-off man.
Melville bought many things with debt: his farm, his rare books, clothes. I don’t find it unimaginable that he paid for the grand tour with debt spending either.
For example, in the 1920's they also extrapolated their current tech into the future. It showed people walking around with phonographs strapped to their hips, having just been dropped off by their personal blimps. Predicting the future is hard, but extrapolating the current state forwards is almost always wrong, and shows a huge failure of imagination.