When it comes to their capacity to screw things up, computers are becoming more human every day.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

I have not proved that the universe is, in fact, a digital computer and that it's capable of performing universal computation, but it's plausible that it is.

All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.

Indeed, as the above calculation indicates, to take full advantage of the memory space available, the ultimate laptop must turn all its matter into energy.

If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.

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