I like PG's idea [1] of trying to write a compiler that can utilize code to run on multiple cores, as if the cores were running in series, not parallel (think batteries).
That's the holy grail of The Cloud: just write a description of what you want and what you want happens. DWIM programmatic casting.
I think pg originated his "sufficiently smart compiler" startup idea in his pycon talk. You can find it online somewhere. The other take away from his talk was: just lie to customers about it being automated, manually farm out the parallelize-all-the-code tasks to works/interns/turks while saying it's "automatic," then eventually figure out how to automate it yourself later so you don't need pesky humans in the loop.
What's with "the cloud" here? That's the holy grail of any type of programming on any type of computing device at any scale. If that were possible it would be just as useful on a phone or a PC or a personal server.
While PGs idea is likely too hard to be doable there is an interesting practical approach with things like Elixir which make multicore fairly easy using functional programming:
"""
Other languages skirt these issues by running on a single CPU with multiple processes to achieve concurrency; however, as Moore's Law pushes us towards increasing multicore CPUs, this approach becomes unmanageable. Elixir's immutable state, Actors, and processes produce a concurrency model that is easy to reason about and allows code to be written distributively without extra fanfare.
[1]: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html