A good writer could do cool stuff with that. It doesn’t even have to be laziness, but the lack of necessity for innovation.
A fun example is Project Hail Mary. The alien species in it is highly intelligent and has invented space travel, but has no computer technology. It’s not that they lack the capacity and ingenuity required to develop computers, but because the structure of their brains that developed for extremely advanced audio processing in an environment without light made them extremely good at mathematics. They never had a need to invent calculators, so they never progressed down the technological path that would eventually lead to computers.
A good writer could do cool stuff with that. It doesn’t even have to be laziness, but the lack of necessity for innovation.
A fun example is Project Hail Mary. The alien species in it is highly intelligent and has invented space travel, but has no computer technology. It’s not that they lack the capacity and ingenuity required to develop computers, but because the structure of their brains that developed for extremely advanced audio processing in an environment without light made them extremely good at mathematics. They never had a need to invent calculators, so they never progressed down the technological path that would eventually lead to computers.
You might enjoy Vinge’s Zones of Thought series.