Laziness is the mother of invention

From tax tables to rocket science, computers were created to make the lazy person's life easier

I have this theory that all the truly great inventions were made by people too lazy, too weak or too cowardly to do things "the way it's always been done" .

Why invent the wheel? To make moving large, heavy things that much easier. Why invent guns? Because the person was too cowardly to fight face-to-face. And why invent automated calculators? Because the person was too lazy to work out mathematical tables for themselves by hand.

That last one really was the starting point for the production of computers – when acclaimed mathematician Blaise Pascal decided that it would be easier to produce tables for his tax officer father by using some form of device than it would be by laboriously working them out.

A century or so later, Charles Babbage followed that same thought process for more complex tables of calculation; half a century after that, Alan Turing repeated that same principle at Bletchley Park to crack German codes quicker; half a decade later, the first true computer was sold to the American census bureau to speed up the tabulation of returns. In all cases, electronic computers answered the laziness of those who faced tasks that were simply too time-consuming to do in the traditional way.

And now we continue that same process. Modern computers are rarely used to do or to find something in a new way. Primarily, I use my computer for writing – because I'm too lazy to write with a pen, too lazy to bother with a typewriter, and would hate to have to rewrite an entire article or book if I needed to make a minor revision.

Computers make the life of the lazy person that much easier. The solution to almost every mathematical problem now solved by computers was already known without the computer: running the program simply produces the answer faster and without the input of much effort.

Rocket science – sometimes thought of as the true domain of the number crunchers – is based on mathematics developed by Isaac Newton at the time of the Great Plague and the Fire of London. All that computers do is make that processing easier.

Even geometry falls into this category. The infamous Four Colour Theorem – which says that any map can be coloured using only four colours, without any two adjacent areas being the same colour – was proved using a computer program. But that program simply stepped through thousands of possible configurations of the map in a fraction of the time that an army of mathematicians would have taken. It produced a solution but only in a mechanistic way. The advantage was that it saved a lot of lazy mathematicians from having to test each and every case themselves.

But in a blow against the lazy, the computer program and the result had to be verified. And for that, the lazy mathematicians had only to rely on pencils and paper. Computers can't relieve us of all of our intellectual burdens!