Looks like we are starting to live in what could be called Interesting Times.
Although Moore’s Law still seems to be holding out a bit longer, individually the cores in CPUs are not that much faster than they used to be. We have been stuck near 3GHz for nearly 10 years now, and a common occurrence on servers and laptops now is to see a process taking 100% of the available core but overall the machine is running at 25% or 16% loading (depending on whether it is a 4 or 8 core machine). In order to get processes to run faster we are going to have to learn how to program with multicore CPUs in mind.
Peak Oil seems to have occurred in the 2004-2007 timeframe, so the days of cheap fuel are behind us. In Canada fuel is still cheap, but $1/L is not something we have seen for a while. How society handles the transition to $2/L is going to be interesting. The effect of higher prices will have a double impact with the expected wild fluctuations in price that many analysts in the Peak Oil field are predicting. It is amusing however to watch local dealers having to do massive truck sales at the end of each year to get rid of their excess inventory of gas guzzling vehicles.
As we track towards 400ppm CO2 the thought that maybe Global Warming would be nice in a country with cold winters is turning out to be mistaken. A better term would have been Anthropogenic Climate Change and the changes that are resulting in more extreme weather with a tendency to more arid conditions on the western edge of the prairies is beginning to make things interesting.
The convergence of computers, open source and manufacturing will be having ramifications soon. The Maker Faire phenomenon of 3D printers and low cost CNC machines has been very instructive and soon may become disruptive when the costs of these technologies falls further. Already a 3D printer can be obtained for $1,000 with a resolution that rivals that of commercial machines that cost 30X more. A good bet would be that this is likely to have a bigger impact than did the arrival of low cost microcomputers that lead to the PC era and subsequently our current Internet era.