For the record, this is the presenter's webpage which has a text summary similar to the presentation and a blog. The blog has not been updated since 2010, when the presentation was given. The only thing more recent than 2010 that a cursory Google search found was a 2011 Business Week article on him which seems to just be a summary of his standard presentation.
Here is presentation from a researcher at MIT on a novel way of designing computer processors. It relies on performing approximate, rather than exact, mathematical operations (like the meat-based processor in our heads!). Claimed benefits are a 10,000-fold improvement in speed, while the errors introduced by the approximations are postulated to be insignificant in many applications.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~bates/Summary_files/BatesTalk.pdf
Slide #2 of the presentation offers a fascinating insight: We currently work around the limitations of the processing substrate to implement a precise computation, and it is becoming increasingly difficult:
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THE MOTIVATING PROBLEM:
Computations specified by programmers are implemented as behavior in physical material
• Hardware designer’s job:
efficiently implement Math (what sw wants) using Physics (what silicon offers)
(near) perfect arith noisy, approximate
uniform mem delay delay ~ distance
• Increasingly difficult as decades passed and transistor counts exploded
• Now each instruction (increment, load register, occasionally multiply) invokes >10M transistor operations, even though a single transistor can perform, for instance, an approximate exponentiate or logarithm
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The parallels and contrasts with our own brain are what interested me the most. Perhaps one day the most powerful computers will be running on "corrupted hardware" of sorts.