Where “Cheaper by the Dozen” meets AI

I recently read the book Cheaper by the Dozen. Some people may be familiar with the 2003 movie by the same name, which is a new take on the 1950s movie that was based on the book.

I haven’t seen the 1950s movie, but I can say the 2003 movie, while entertaining, is only very loosely based on the book. The family has 12 kids in both the movie and the book and that’s about where the similarities end.

For one, the book Cheaper by the Dozen is a true story. There really was a Frank and Lillian Gilbreth in Montclair, New Jersey who had 12 kids and both worked in the field of scientific management and pioneered “time and motion studies.”

I can probably relate to the family life of the Gilbreths more than most and the book is an entertaining read for sure. But I’m afraid what the Gilbreths did with their time and motions studies, distilling everything to the most efficient and famous, “one best way” of doing things, works against the family life they appeared to so well embody.

I get it, there’s certainly a business application to time and motion studies, but the assumption behind this field (and later the field of ergonomics) is that faster is always better, efficiency is king, and progress for progress’s sake is sacred.

As much as Frank Gilbreth appeared to be a pro-family man, his studies and innovations lead to a very anti-family conclusion. In a non-agrarian culture, having lots of kids is anything but “efficient.” And for that matter, so are humans.

At the end of the book (spoiler alert) someone asks Frank Gilbreth what he wants to save all this time for. He says, “For work, if you love that best. For education, for beauty, for art, for pleasure. For mumblety-peg, if that’s where your heart lies.”

I find his answer kind of sad. If saving time is so important is the best use of saved time doing what you want? Isn’t that just…selfish?

The Cheaper by the Dozen book is set about 100 years ago but there are lessons to be learned from it today. One big takeaway is that there seems to be an unintended consequence of improving efficiency and it's tethered to the degradation of humanity. It turns out there are always time and motion improvements because man is not a machine. The more you improve the more he becomes like a machine. And therefore less human.

This is surely instructive about the stated goal of AI innovation. Teaching tech to replace humans is an easy sell for business. Want a worker who always shows up, never says no, never gets sick, and can work without getting tired?

But the arguments that AI will take over tasks and that will allow people to be more fully human is terribly mistaken and overtly hubristic.

Uh, when did doing chores become un-human? When did taking care of each other become an outsourcing project for robots? I’ve heard people brag how it won’t be long until you won’t have to “waste” time thinking as the AI will do the thinking for you. When did thinking become optional or an obstacle to overcome?

Gilbreth wanted his kids to be renaissance men with a wide background of studies. He was likely a product of a time when western civilization still knew the, “one best way” was in fact a broad education that avoided a “one best way” of thinking. Ironically, time and motion studies always prioritize specialization over general knowledge and that has changed education into something Gilbreth wouldn’t even recognize.

It’s entertaining and sometimes ingenious to see the application of efficiency studies in a large family. But I can’t help feeling the metrics are off. That humans being timed, evaluated, and improved to be more like a machine is a surrender of more than our dignity to machines. It’s a surrender of our humanity.