The End of Digital Tyranny: Why the Future of Computing Is Analog

Most of us rarely think about it, but when we turn on our smartphones and PCs, we're giving ourselves over to machines that reduce every single task to a series of 1s and 0s. But according to Doug Burger, a researcher with Microsoft's Extreme Computing Group, this may be coming to an end. Burger thinks we could be entering a new era where we don't need digital accuracy. To hear him tell it, the age of really big data may well be an age of slightly less-accurate computing. We could drop the digital straightjacket and write software that's comfortable working on hardware that sometimes makes errors.