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

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs.

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?

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.

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.

For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role.

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