Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.

One of the things that I've been doing recently in my scientific research is to ask this question: Is the universe actually capable of performing things like digital computations?

Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices.

What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.

When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer.

The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.

Some folks think life and technology and mind can keep expanding forever. Others say it can't. We are still not clear on that.