Minimal Effort, Maximum Results

What would Rube Goldberg say?

A couple of weekends ago, while visiting my grandson Tor’s family, we found the most amazing book at a library book sale: The Art of Rube Goldberg. I had not thought about Rube Goldberg for decades, and yet his contraptions (think Mouse Trap, the 1960s board game) were a huge part of my soul life as a child. Tor was as instantly mesmerized by Goldberg’s intricate, impossible machines as I had been, some 60 years ago. Boomers, if Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg’s (1883-1970) name doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps this little video will:

Though I had also created for Tor a little boxed set of Shel Silverstein’s wonderful books, when we crawled into bed for story time that evening, Tor demanded Rube Goldberg. He pointed and guffawed at every page of Goldberg’s burlesqueries, and in the morning the aspiring five–year–old engineer of course started to design and build his own Goldbergian gizmos. I was pretty much convinced that by the time the snow melted, we would have a major installation ready for the front lawn.

Way back in 1928, Goldberg’s madcap comic contraptions had so caught the popular imagination for being—as he put it—“a symbol of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results,” that he became a cultural icon. Goldberg’s own name became shorthand for all manner of unwieldy artifacts – both material and metaphysical – of the modern machine age.

Immersed – and downright frightened for my grandchildren – as I have been of late in the stupefying mechanical legerdemain of machine intelligence, Tor’s instantaneous embrace of Rube Goldberg’s oeuvre gave me great heart: boys and girls would ever and anon gravitate toward tinkering with stuff, as soon as their imaginations were stimulated. Tor’s exuberant laugh and crazy, squirming, flabbergasted fascination as we mentally examined each of Goldberg’s irresistible perplexities assured me that no matter the degree to which automated consciousness invaded human culture, a child’s unbridled curiosity and seething, surging need to manipulate the world would trump AI no matter what.

It seems abundantly clear that we are on the threshold of the catastrophic inversion of Rube’s “maximum effort to achieve minimal results,” i.e., minimal effort to achieve maximum results. Sidling up to my laptop tonight to compose this post, I wondered whether any contemporary writers had mused upon Rube Goldberg’s legacy in the light of the AI juggernaut. Lo and behold, while I could find nary a single such commentary, it turns out that Rube’s iconicity is so solidly enduring that “Rube Goldberg” has become an AI metaphor, increasingly used to describe AI systems that are overly complex, combining numerous tools and models (like "AI Agents") in a convoluted, potentially fragile chain of actions to perform relatively simple tasks. Like our so–called “smart” phones, it did not take long for the ghostly machine cognition chimeras – egged on by the perennial human propensity for the love of ease – to lapse into Goldbergian absurdity.

If Rube Goldberg is the patron saint of playful systems-thinking—the human artist-author guiding chains of causality, making the invisible visible, turning mechanism into comedy—then perhaps his art can inspire us parents and grandparents as we seek to counteract the epidemic of disembodied fluency that now envelops us, courtesy of the AI–cheerleading oligarchs who would outsource both our Thinking and our Willing to Claude, Gemini, or Grok. Tor’s generation and every coming generation of children need and deserve embodied, authored, accountable play; greasy, grimy, gopher guts play – the only activity that can metamorphose into noble, embodied learning and work, and thus into dependable character and soul building.