Every “AI does X, but Y stays human” eventually loses its Y. The one Y that never moves is laziness — the urge to do more with less — plus a little arrogance. A semi-serious history of the idea that laziness, not necessity, is the mother of invention.
I keep reading the same sentence. It shows up in every article that’s excited about AI:
“AI is great at X, but Y is still a human thing.”
Put whatever you want in X and Y. Coding, but taste. Drawing, but real creativity. Talking, but real empathy. It doesn’t matter. The trick is always the same, and so is the ending: give it a year or two, and the Y you were so proud of quietly becomes an X.
We’ve been doing this forever. Chess was the human thing, until 1997. Translation was the human thing, until it wasn’t. “A machine will never write a poem, paint a picture, hold a real conversation” — we said all of those, out loud, recently. Every time a machine learns the thing, we just stop calling it the human thing and move the line one step back. There’s even a name for the move: as soon as a computer can do something, we decide it wasn’t really intelligence after all.
So I started wondering: is there any Y that doesn’t move? A real human skill a machine can’t take — not because it’s hard, but because of what it is?
I think there is. And it’s not a flattering one.
The skill under all the other skills
Here’s my answer: the one thing that’s really ours is laziness.
Not laziness as in doing nothing. Laziness as in: do more with less. Less effort, less work, less sweat — physical or mental. Since the first guy tied a sharp stone to a stick so he wouldn’t have to get close to the angry animal, this is the one move we keep making. We build things so we don’t have to do things.
That’s not a side effect of being human. That’s the engine. Every tool, every machine, every line of code I’ve ever written exists because someone couldn’t be bothered to do the job by hand. Fare più con meno — do more with less — is the whole story of the species in four words.
And that’s exactly why no machine takes it from us. The machine doesn’t want to do less. It doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t get bored, it doesn’t sigh and think “there has to be an easier way.” We do. Laziness is the one skill that builds all the other skills — including the machines that replace the other skills. It’s safe precisely because it’s the source.
My favorite proof is sitting on your couch.
The first thing I pictured, before I looked it up, was some guy too lazy to get up and change the channel, with no kid around to send — or a kid who told him, politely, to go change it himself. So he invented the remote out of pure laziness, with a little help from his son’s arrogance.
The real story is almost better. The first TV remote was made by Zenith in 1950, and they actually called it the Lazy Bones. They named it after laziness, right on the box. It was wired, so you didn’t have to get up but you tripped over the cable instead. In 1955 a Zenith engineer, Eugene Polley, built the first wireless one — you pointed a flashlight at the corners of the screen. And the boss who pushed all of this, Zenith’s founder, had one big motivation: he hated commercials and wanted people to be able to kill them. So the remote, the thing in your hand right now, was invented by lazy people who couldn’t stand ads. That’s us. The whole species in one gadget.
A short, semi-serious history of getting out of work
I’m not the first to notice this. There’s a long line of people who said, in nicer words, that laziness runs the show. Some of them were serious. Most of them were half-joking, which is the right way to talk about this.
Start with the cliché everyone repeats: “necessity is the mother of invention.” People say it’s Plato. It isn’t, not really — Plato only said our needs would build the city, and a translator in the 1890s made it snappy. The Latin version, mater artium necessitas, is centuries old. Fine. But it’s also wrong, and Agatha Christie said so better than I can. In her autobiography she wrote: “I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness — to save oneself trouble.” That’s the thesis of this whole article, written by a crime novelist decades before me.
Then there’s Robert Heinlein, who put it in the mouth of one of his characters: “Progress doesn’t come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.” Sorry to the morning people.
It’s not just writers. Frank Gilbreth, the man who basically invented time-and-motion study a hundred years ago, said the best worker to study was the lazy one — because the lazy worker had already found the way that wastes the fewest moves. His own kids wrote it down: a lazy man makes the best use of his motions because he’s too lazy to waste any.
You’ve probably seen the LinkedIn version of this: “I will always choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it” — usually with Bill Gates’ face next to it. Gates never said it. Nobody can find him saying it. The closest real source is a Chrysler executive in 1947, defending lazy men to a U.S. Senate committee. So the most-shared “Bill Gates productivity quote” on the internet is fake, and the real one is a car guy talking to senators. Somehow that makes me trust the idea more.
And then, for people like me, there’s Larry Wall, who invented the Perl language. He wrote down the three great virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. Not as a joke — as actual advice. His definition of Laziness is perfect: “the quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure.” You work hard once so you never have to work again. That’s every good piece of software ever written.
If you want the fancy crowd: Bertrand Russell wrote In Praise of Idleness in 1932 and argued we should all work about four hours a day. Marx’s own son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, wrote a little book called The Right to Be Lazy — instead of fighting for the right to work, he fought for the right to not. Oscar Wilde said leisure, not labor, is the point of being human. Even Aristotle, way back, said we work only so we can have time off — that the free time, not the work, is the goal. Smart people have been defending laziness for 2,400 years. They just had better PR than “I’m too lazy.”
(There’s one honest catch, from Jerome K. Jerome: “It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.” Laziness only feels good when there’s something you’re getting out of. Fair enough.)
The other thing they can’t take: arrogance
Larry Wall’s list had three virtues, not one. I skipped two on purpose. Impatience I’ll leave alone. But the third one is too good to drop: hubris. Arrogance.
Laziness on its own isn’t enough. Laziness tells you you shouldn’t have to do the boring thing. Arrogance is what tells you you’re smart enough to make something else do it. “I shouldn’t have to do this” plus “and I know better than the guy who says it can’t be done” — that’s not a character flaw, that’s the exact mindset of every inventor who ever lived. The humble, polite person does the work. The arrogant lazy person builds a machine and goes back to the couch.
And this is the other thing a machine can’t really have. It can fake confidence — you’ve all seen an AI be wrong with total certainty. But that’s a copy. Real arrogance is ours: the smugness, the spocchia, the “I obviously know better,” the deep belief that the rules and the manual and the best practices are for other people. A model can copy the tone. It doesn’t actually think it’s the smartest one in the room. We do. Every single time.
So if you ask me what’s left when the machines are better than us at everything, my answer is two things, and neither of them is noble: we’re lazy, and we’re full of ourselves. Those are the two settings that built all the rest.
A note for my fellow Italians
Let me get local for a second, because I think we have an unfair advantage here.
I think Italy will end up being one of the fastest countries to really adopt AI, and not for any noble reason. It’s because using AI feels like cheating, and we love cheating. Not in a dark way — in the furbizia way, the “I found a shortcut and the rules didn’t catch me” way. We tell that story like it’s a good thing. Beating “the system” is practically a national sport.
Watch what happens when someone jumps the queue here. Everyone gets angry — but be honest about why. It’s not because they think it’s unfair. It’s because that person pulled it off and they didn’t. Deep down they wanted to be the one cutting in. Nobody admits it, but that’s the real reason.
AI is the perfect queue-jump. A tool that does the work while you take the credit, finds the shortcut, games the system, and hands you the result. For a culture that already thinks like that, it’s not a threat. It’s a dream come true. We’ve been training for this for centuries.
So, is our humanity safe?
Yeah, actually. It’s safe.
It’s just not the part we wanted to save.
We keep hunting for the noble Y — the creativity, the empathy, the deep human spark — and every year a machine eats another one. The thing that survives isn’t the spark. It’s the laziness that builds the machine that eats the spark, and the arrogance to feel clever about it.
Which is the funny part, if you think about it. The one skill that’s truly safe is the exact skill that makes every other skill unsafe. We’ll automate ourselves out of almost everything, except the urge to automate ourselves out of everything. And we’ll be too comfortable — remote in hand, ad muted — to mind.
So relax. No machine is taking your humanity. It’s right where you left it: on the couch, doing as little as possible, sure it could have done your job better anyway.