Having no empirical evidence or testable implications, this argument is not science or even scientific speculation. In the language of pragmatism and logical positivism, if the notion can’t possibly make any testable difference from the belief that we’re really living in a real universe, the notion is worse than wrong—it’s meaningless.

It’s also remarkably anthropocentric. Although the rise of our kind of technological intelligence seems inevitable in retrospect, every step leading to Homo sapiens and our computers was both extremely rare and entirely accidental. All the crucial steps in this chain appear to have occurred only once on Earth: multicellular life, intelligent life, Homo sapiens, and computers. In particular, there’s little evidence that there’s any selection pressure toward greater intelligence, and there’s even less evidence that, except for humans, organisms with greater intelligence inevitably invent anything, including computers. And, even if another form of life on another planet developed computers, on what basis do we assume that such a project would even occur to them? Maybe they’d find a better use—such as solving the problem of the heat death of the universe.