Academic compression

But most of the mark details are useless, all you require is a single bit "pass" or "fail". Nobody is going to read your detailed marks for each semester exam later in your career. For all reasonable degrees, it's basically a two-bit information: Dropout, Bachelor, Master, PhD. Don't think "dropout" is a career limiter: The world's richest man is a dropout.

I'm quite sure I'll see several limits to the exponential growth in my lifetime (probably the next 50 years), at least I already experience one (probably temporal) limit: clock frequency didn't go up much the last 5 years. There however is a way to get more power out of computers: write better software. It is amazing what vintage computer fans get out of ancient designs. We are used to write software for computers that get faster and have more memory, so we write a lot of slow, bloated software.

Due to the fact that single-threaded CPUs don't get (significantly) faster anymore, we probably should start right now: Use better algorithms to make single-threaded programs faster.