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.)
A huge amount surely, at least for many problems. There's no guarantee that any particular problem will be subject to vast further software improvements, though.
Can you expand on this? I suspect this is true for some classes of problems, but I'm sufficiently uncertain that I'm intrigued by your claim about this being "surely" going to happen.