the virtue of laziness (?)
laziness has played a strange role in human progress throughout history. the ancient greeks looked down on manual labor—not because they were morally weak, but as a matter of philosophy. to them, free time represented the best state of human life, allowing deep thinking and pursuit of truth. of course, this ideal depended entirely on slavery; while philosophers debated ideas in public squares, enslaved people did the real work that kept greek society running.
the judeo-christian traditions turned this view upside down. "by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food" became not just description but prescription. work transformed from necessity to virtue. by the 6th century, christian theology had labeled laziness (sloth) as one of cardinal sins. the protestant work ethic later made this even stronger, turning hard work into a sign of divine favor.
yet in computer programming, laziness has become a virtue again—though in a specific way. larry wall, who created the perl programming language, famously called laziness one of the three great virtues of a programmer. this "laziness" pushes programmers to write programs that save work, to automate boring tasks, and to find simple solutions that need little future fixing. the lazy programmer writes code that works harder so humans work less.
this echoes the greek ideal in surprising ways. just as greek thinkers saw manual labor as getting in the way of deeper thinking, programmers see repetitive tasks as blocking creative problem-solving. but our digital "slavery" still has moral costs. our automated systems run on electricity mostly from fossil fuels, while our devices need rare earth minerals dug up through harmful mining. we've largely shifted from exploiting human bodies to exploiting the earth itself. the data centers powering our "lazy" solutions consume vast amounts of energy, contributing to climate change.
now, artificial intelligence takes this productive laziness to its limit. we've automated not just manual work but thinking itself. ai systems can write code, solve hard problems, make "art", and make decisions. this is the greek ideal pushed to its extreme—maximum free time for deep thought, with ai doing ever more complex tasks.
but the moral costs grow. ai systems use huge amounts of energy for training and inference. we're using up nature faster than ever to achieve more laziness than ever.
there's also a deeper question: unlike programmers' automation that freed us for higher work, ai threatens to automate that "higher work" itself—creative tasks, analysis, even programming. we might create a world where human laziness isn't a virtue but makes us pointless.
maybe the virtue isn't in laziness itself, but in what it makes us create and how we create it. the greeks' disdain for work (built on exploiting people) still produced amazing philosophy. modern "lazy" programmers built our digital world. the challenge now has three parts: achieving moral laziness through clean energy, making sure ai helps rather than replaces human purpose, and keeping human choice meaningful in a world that's more and more automated.
until we solve these problems, our laziness stays morally complex, its virtue incomplete. the question isn't just how to get free time without exploiting others, but how to keep human life meaningful in a world where machines can think for us.