The Power Of Laziness

Rather than language, tool use, or culture, is it our gift for laziness that makes us human?

- Dr Antone Martinho-Truswell

Are we humans the laziest animals on Earth? It can be easy to think so. Endowed with the most powerful brains in the animal kingdom, we’ve put them to use making cars, computers, robot vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, automatic money sorters, and audiobooks – every manner of device and system to minimise effort. Only the human has harnessed combustion so that it might spare us the labour of walking. Only the human has erected supply chains so that fresh meat may be politely purchased from a nearby Waitrose rather than tracked and killed over a long hunt. We are masters of offloading work to machines. If this is laziness, then laziness is a hallmark of our species. More than tools, language or culture, we are marked by the complex accessories that we build to do our work for us, both physical and mental. There are many tool-using animals, from chimps to cockatoos. A whole host of animals communicate using vocalisations that we could describe as language. A few animals build cultures by handing information down the generations. But only humans build systems to relieve them of those tasks. Artificial intelligence is simply the next stage in a long history of automation that’s taken us from horses to steam to silicon and beyond.

LAZY BY NATURE