[g00dn3ss]

I still think this quote from the Hamming article points to one of the biggest opportunities for making a difference across all fields (at least for a programmer):

"Since from the time of Newton to now, we have come close to doubling knowledge every 17 years, more or less. And we cope with that, essentially, by specialization. In the next 340 years at that rate, there will be 20 doublings, i.e. a million, and there will be a million fields of specialty for every one field now. It isn't going to happen. The present growth of knowledge will choke itself off until we get different tools."

One problem that will continue to need solving is finding better tools to organize and search through all the information out there. That's more of the problem Google solves, as others have mentioned above.

Another, related problem is finding better ways to get the information into our heads. To give you an extreme example, coming up with a way to access a hard drive directly with our brain could potentially allow us to tackle harder problems. That's pretty hard and probably a long way off. But you can probably imagine baby steps toward that.

There's also the whole AI problem but the media has covered that one enough that it doesn't really need mentioning.