Java 8 introduced improvements to concurrency and parallel programming. It added new atomic classes like AtomicInteger that use more efficient fetch-and-add instead of compare-and-swap. These atomics are important for concurrent data structures like ConcurrentHashMap. Java 8 also enhanced parallel streams for efficiently processing collections in parallel using ForkJoinPool. However, care must be taken to ensure tasks are sufficiently parallelized as parallel streams may be inefficient for tasks that are too fine-grained. Future areas of focus include hardware transactional memory, databases, and quantum computing.