The lazy ape Is our gift for laziness what makes us human?
Rather than language, tool use, or culture, is it our gift for laziness that makes us human?
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 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.
“We can be quite judgmental about our lazy peers, but laziness is a valuable adaptation”
LAZY BY NATURE
We humans can be quite judgmental about our lazy peers, but laziness is among the most valuable adaptations for successful life. And it’s not just a human trait. In the animal kingdom, laziness is a necessity. Any animal – indeed, any organism – has to maintain a balance of energy in and energy out. If an animal profligately wastes energy by, say, moving around or working hard, and does not compensate for this with plenty of eating, then that animal will not survive for long. Laziness tells an animal how to manage this: if you do not absolutely need to do something, don’t. This lazy impulse is just one of many impulses that propel an animal’s life – so it does not always win out, and animals do frequently prance and play and preen – but the drive to conserve precious energy is always there.
Whenever we yoke an ox to a plough, or set an algorithm investing, we are, in a sense, achieving new heights in this common drive to laziness. More than just waiting to plough until we need to and then only ploughing what we need, we’ve arranged things so that we do not have to do the ploughing (at least not the hard part of it), but still get to do the eating. Our chimpanzee relatives are some of the smartest non-humans on the planet, but they don’t come close to that kind of clever facilitation of doing nothing. In general, clever animals seem to be able to spend more of their time on laziness, and chimpanzees are no exception – they nap, socialise and play in a way that a mouse, constantly in desperate straits to stay alive, could only dream of. Despite this, though, chimpanzees still have hard work to do. Being large animals, they need to consume a lot of food and vitamins, and may spend almost 30 per cent of their time foraging – more than half their waking hours. They may be able to use stick-tools to catch nutritious termites to save some time, but we humans, with fast food and ready meals, spend almost none of our time sourcing food. Nor do many of us
2 work in food production. Back in 1400, almost 60 per cent of the
British workforce was involved in agriculture. Today, our lazinessenabling technology has that number down to around 1 per cent. Our ingenuity allows us to be lazier than the chimps.
But there’s true laziness, and then there’s efficiency. Every animal benefits from efficiency. Efficient strategies mean you can either get more energy in or reduce energy out in a shorter time or with less effort. In other words, efficiency is ultimately in service of laziness. The same drive to laziness that animates (or rather, dis-animates) all animals motivates our own labour-saving technology. A truly lazy ape would have embraced, at a species-wide level, the opportunity for laziness that our technology allows. We, however, rebel against it – we always have.
Instead of satisfying ourselves with lives of supine relaxation, we are constantly looking for ways to be more efficient. With agriculture, we made keeping ourselves fed more efficient. We could have become lazy producing enough to eat in less time, and committing the spare hours to relaxation. Instead, we produce extra food, feed our livestock, and eat them instead. A lazy ape would have stopped with basic vegetable farming, but we put extra effort in because we like the taste of meat. We domesticated horses to allow some other beast to do some of our walking for us. A lazy ape would have stopped there, but we found we liked speed, and so have built every manner of vehicle to make transit faster and more comfortable. We built computers to handle our memory and calculations for us, but unsatisfied with that we are now trying to build artificial intelligence to make decisions without even asking us. A lazy move, to be sure, but a truly lazy ape would never have made it that far. Once they had enough to survive, they would’ve stopped.
So more than the lazy ape, instead I think we’re the ‘building ape’. We create laziness- enabling machines to free up more time and more resources to build something bigger. We scaffold technology upon technology and idea upon idea in pursuit of goals of which a lazy ape would never dream. Like every animal, we needed laziness to keep ourselves alive in times of scarcity or to discourage any activity where costs might outweigh the benefits. But we have come out the other side of laziness. Most humans who read this won’t have known real, threatening scarcity like the majority of animals face. We have the technology to be the laziest animal on Earth, and yet we are not lazy. We want to make things – more, better, bigger, different, and more complex. Even once all of our needs are met, we stand up, get back to work, and build.