Hardware Topics

Moore's Law: Scaling of hardware. Heat, cycles, "metabolism" for computing systems.
Massively Parallel: Communities of Systems; Beowulf-like parallelism.
Smart FPGA's:  Self organizing, self updating/modifying components

Software Topics

Decentralized Component Architectures:  For networked speakers, talking maps, voice controlled web radios.
Homogeneity:  cc -O considered harmful.  How make computing more heterogeneous.
Community Service Architectures: SmallWorld analysis of Gnutella, Napster, other autonomous services.
Non-halting problem: Dave Ackley's set of points on computing dilemmas
Laws of Cyberspace:  L. Lessig on the Commons, end-end transparency, crypto tension with anonymity.
Fussless Systems: Transparent configuration, backup and restore.  Self healing computers.
Self Healing Servers: Redundant, slow, secure systems (LOCKSS, Long Now Library)
Entropy/Information:  Info study of software as it matures through successive revisions.

Network Topics

WWW: Tim Berners-Lee [Weaving the Web] XML, Schemas and an emergent Semantic Web.
Autonomous Network Non-Servers: Friends helping friends: Serverless DNS, Gateways, DHCP, SLP
Self Organizing Routers: Learning, SLP-like routing protocols and hardware
Herds of Appliances: Scaling to billions of lightbulbs, who will be the system admin?  Or even plug in?
Scarce Resources: Economic resource analysis and equilibrium applied to network of computers.