Increasingly larger problems can be solved in the same time period. Processing is getting wider, but staying a similar speed... except IO - which has gone from

Increasingly larger problems can be solved in the same time period. Processing is getting wider, but staying a similar speed... except IO - which has gone from 40MB/s to 1000MB/s for fairly cheap hardware. The network has also sped up in a major way, with terabits/s possible. Branch prediction allows us to follow multiple possible serial paths, and the wider our processors the more branches we can follow. Software advances have made it trivial for even beginner programmers to process many events in parallel. Automatic vectorizing compilers have been available for over a decade now. Transactional memory is becoming mainstream, with compiler support and even hardware support. Massive libraries of highly optimized maths and scientific routines are being developed by 1000s of people at once over the internet and made available for free. I don't think it's hard to use up all that power. Even on the cutting edge, gaining a 10x or 100x speed up is not unheard of. Problems are becoming more and more about the functionality required, and the vision, rather than being limited by the processing speed and power available. tldr; we are ok, and we're going to be ok.