Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.
When it comes to their capacity to screw things up, computers are becoming more human every day.
Yes, I am a quantum mechanic! Those darn quantum computers break all the time.
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.
If you wanted to build the most powerful computer you could, you can't do better than including everything in the universe that's potentially available.
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.
The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.