A while ago I wrote briefly on why the Singularity might not be near and my estimates badly off. I saw it linked the other day, and realized that pessimism seemed to be trendy lately, which meant I ought to work on why one might be optimistic instead: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#counter-point
(Summary: long-sought AI goals have been recently achieved, global economic growth & political stability continues, and some resource crunches have turned into surpluses - all contrary to long-standing pessimistic forecasts.)
Two additional promising fields and one small critique. The first case I want to make is prosthetics: the ease with which scientist and engineers nowadays interface with the human central nervous system is very promising. Artificial retinas, robotic arms controlled through implanted electrodes, rats whose shortterm/longterm-memory transfer was substituted by a chip.
Photovoltaics is the other one; prices are in free fall and no end in sight. After a long time of silicium-shortage, huge production capabilities have come online, producers are in heavy competition, some form of grid parity is reached, new innovations are continuing to stream out of the labs into the fabs.
My critique: I do believe it overly optimistic of you to conclude that peak oil has been significantly delayed by new techniques; and even believe Peak Oil to have already happened.
Oil production certainly didn't peak in or before 2011; so do you mean this year, or are you using a different definition?