Are we still human if robots help raise our babies? | Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Kelly Corrigan takeover)

0:07You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm Kelly Corrigan. I'm a writer. I'm a podcaster. I'm a TED Talker. And I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life. I guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025. And I'm here now to share these very special talks with you, along with behind-the-scenes recordings and personal insights that shed light on the process of bringing them to life.

0:49Sarah Blaffer-Hurdy is such a delight. She's almost 80 years old. She takes no guff from nobody. And she is a true expert in her field. She's an American anthropologist and primatologist. She's made huge contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. She won a Guggenheim. She went to Harvard, blah, blah, blah. But she really, really understands evolution and the way mothers and fathers have over time been understood, misunderstood, and re-understood. So when I first started talking about this fundamental question, in a modern world, in an AI world, what is a parent for? I knew that we needed somebody who could give us the broadest possible view, you know, like like the 6 million year look at us as a species and our evolution and the way that we have typically raised children.

1:52And there's something about Sarah, really. She has such a twinkle in her eye. She's such a happy academic. Like this is what she was born to do was take on really big, weird questions like this. Okay, so let me ask this. My head is exploding. This is such a fun project. If you were to convince the audience that a baby's number one slot is up for grabs. Oh, that's a lovely way to put it. She's probably most famous for surfacing this idea of alloparents, which means other parents. So there was this sort of resting belief that infants were completely attached to their mother in a singular way. and the idea that she introduced is that can't possibly be true they'd never have survived they're very needy they're very expensive little creatures it takes them forever to stand up on their own and move into the world and because of that there's no way that there weren't other mothers involved in the rearing of these children which means that children can attach to people who are not their mother.

3:07Sarah is so fun to work with because she wasn't thinking about AI at all. When we first called her, I think she thought, oh, I'm going to talk about the things I typically talk about. I mean, she goes around the world giving talks. The super theme of TED this year is humanity reimagined. Yes. And it's, you know, what's a human for? In an AI world, what's a human for? And so our block is kind of what's a mother for? Well, if you ask me what is, I have multiple choice and I can only give one answer. What is a human for? What did we evolve for? Caretaking. And I don't think you have to be a biological, a genetic parent.

3:46I don't like the term biological mother. I think there is a tremendous alloparental potential for care that hasn't been recognized yet. And I think it needs to be recognized. And I put this idea in front of her, like, can you imagine a reality where AI is involved intimately in the rearing of children? Could they attach to an AI? We wondered if you might be interested in teaching the audience something about mothers and allo mothers and why this is the ultimate job for humans that can never be replaced in any meaningful way by any other type of intelligence. Never? That's a good scientist. Not never, I guess.

4:41Not never. She had this huge smile in the column. She said, interesting. And then off she went. And within, it felt like minutes, she had delivered back a draft of a talk. So before we go too much further into the near future, maybe the move is to go all the way back. And frankly, after spending time with Sarah Hurdy, I think all serious inquiries about what's right for humanity should include a world-class anthropologist. So here is Sarah Hurdy giving us six million years of human evolution in nine minutes. Thank you. Have fun. Thank you. I guess you've already figured out, like it or not, artificial intelligence is going to change the nature of human work.

5:36But will it change human nature? That's going to depend on what we do with it. Right away, the mother and the grandmother in me wants to know, oh, hey, can we program robots to help us care for our sleep-depriving, time-consuming babies? That's before the evolutionary anthropologist in me cautions, whoa, shouldn't we first ask why such costly, costly, slow-maturing babies evolved in the first place? For that, we need to go back, oh, six million years to when humans last shared a common ancestor with other apes. Babies back then would have to be held in skin-to-skin contact, never out of touch, not for a minute of the day or night, for months after birth, nursed for years.

6:37It just seemed natural to assume that among the bipedal apes in the line leading to the genus Homo, babies could similarly expect single-mindedly dedicated maternal care. Until, that is, anthropologists figured out how hard it would have been for bipedal apes with only Stone Age tools to survive and escape extinction in the face of climate change and other Pleistocene perils. To stay fed and manage to still rear their helpless, helpless, slow-maturing babies, mothers needed help. Unless male and female group members other than the mother, aloe mothers, had helped to care for and provision babies, there is no way we humans could have evolved.

7:39Fortunately for us, as brains were getting bigger and distinctively human prefrontal cortices were taking shape, our ancestors were increasingly sharing food and sharing care of children. Neural circuits, crucial for mutual understanding, co-evolved right along with shared care. Fast forward to the ever faster changing modern world. Mothers still labor to help support their families, as mothers always have. But many no longer live in mutually supportive communities with kin far away, and even with dads helping more. Allo mothers were in short supply. Good daycare, even if available, unaffordable.

8:34No wonder parents everywhere use devices to keep their babies monitored and entertained. Already, 40 percent of U.S. two-year-olds have their own tablets. Soon, robots will be programmed to provide a wider range of services, ranging from bottle feeding to keeping babies safe, warm, cleaned, and even educated. But given the role of engagement with others in the emergence of mutual understanding, is this a good idea? Think back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. still living and rearing children. Babies then, to stay safe, still needed to be held by somebody. But that somebody did not have to be their mother.

9:28Right after birth, others might reach for the baby. It allows others to gather around. She's passed her baby to her own mother to massage its scalp. If one of these aloe mothers happens to be nursing, the baby's first sweet taste of milk will come from her. Soon, babies will be monitoring nearby others, deciding who responds, figuring out how best to engage and appeal to them. By six months, the sharp little milk teeth are peeking through their gums. Their appeals might be rewarded with kiss-fed treats, maybe honey-sweetened saliva or pre-masticated meat. And babies soon are learning to reciprocate, starting to share.

10:16Babies everywheres will just spontaneously offer food to somebody else, anybody, really. Active agents in their own survival, babies are flexible about who or what they attach or consider as family. Something to keep in mind if robots are programmed to respond even more rapidly and reliably than preoccupied parents do. And as they get older, they will spontaneously point to things or hold something out, as if saying, what do you think of this? What should I think of this? eager to engage with other minds and learn what they're thinking. They care. They care very much who notices them do something nice, like a toddler rushing to pick up something someone has dropped and hand it back.

11:13They care not just with what others think, but with what others think about them, their reputations. As developmental psychologists were learning just how other-regarding human babies are, Neuroscientists using new baby-friendly technologies made a surprising discovery. With a soft, wired cap slipped on the baby's head, neural activity was detected in the medial prefrontal cortex long before most neuroscientists even assumed it was active yet. As babies process eye gaze, actions, deciding who to trust, emulate and love. Little humans process their physical world in much the same way other apes do.

12:09Nothing much different there. It's in these social realms where they really differ. Inner subjective sensibilities starting to emerge early in life right along with targeted social smiles. Brain circuitry that evolved to help babies elicit care and survive prepared our ancestors to mature into adults able to communicate and cooperate in new ways, whether constructing shelters or processing and sharing food, or eventually, one day, collaborating with widely dispersed others in order to send robots to Mars. Tens of thousands of years from now, assuming Homo sapiens aeensis is still around, whether on this planet or some other, I have no doubt that they will be bipedal, symbol-generating apes, technologically proficient in ways we can't even dream of yet.

13:16But will they still be human in the way we think of humans today, interested in the thoughts and emotions of others, eligible for mutual understanding? That's going to depend on how, by whom, or what they are reared. Thank you.

13:39Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back after a short break.

13:47So I learned that when you're working with a scientist, a serious scientist, they are very conscientious about exactly how they phrase things. And so my efforts to make her talk more ready for a generalist audience rather than an audience full of academics had to accommodate her very high bar for specificity. And there couldn't be a single overstatement. And so, you know, you have that situation where you're trying to marry something fairly detailed with a very general audience, especially the online audience who are bouncing around in the middle of their ordinary day, and then they might fall into this talk.

14:36You don't want to lose them at the top by going into excruciating detail about the history of homo sapiens. So the work with Sarah was really about what is the basic scaffolding that we can offer at the top such that we can get into this bigger, weirder question of what defines our species in terms of how we interact and develop. And then how might that change and create like a new species? So for all of you who weren't there, I want you to know that the audience gasped when she showed this slide of a little baby making eye contact with a mom bot. Because right before that, she had set up this very basic truth, which is babies will respond to whomever responds to them.

15:31Whether that person or that thing is man or machine. You know, the mother-infant bond is so basic and the most powerful emotion in all of nature, I think, is an infant's desire to be close to the caretaker. And of course, that is most often the mother because she's right there and she's nursing and so forth. But it turns out that babies can come to love anyone if they are responsive and right there, right from birth, they attach to whoever is responsive and caretaking and those people come to love them. So is that a family tie? It has to do with the context in which the emotions are elicited. listening.

16:17Couldn't it be that three speakers later, the AI guy would say, right. And if it's up for grabs, if it's not written in the code of our beings, then the number one slot could be taken by Mombot. It easily could be, but would we want that? Because the Mombot has no perspective. Yes, or you could instill one in it. But I find that very scary. But you were saying if a nerdy tech bro is going to create the mom bot. What does he know about love and human emotions? What if you were to create the mom bot? Someone who does know about love and human emotion. You couldn't pay me enough to do it. What if someone just like you would be amenable to the job?

17:08the other huge takeaway i had from sarah is that of course once you settle into her talk you're thinking we're always changing we're always moving into a slightly different version of our species and so it helps to know what is the defining feature and in Sarah's telling, it's being other regarding. It's the only way that we could ever survive. But to my ear, other regarding sounded kind of beautiful and special and something that we should be preserving. When I listen to you, the thing I feel lifted by is that this other regardingness is to me deeply encouraging. It is, but it's not what everybody wants.

18:01In a different society, they want a society full of shameless warriors who are not burdened by having to care about somebody else who are just out there doing it. And they are social contacts where that would be advantageous. You know, when I started writing Father Time and was thinking of more male care, I was so much more optimistic about where we were headed than I am today. Sitting here today, do you have a sense of what would be lost? I think babies are constantly probing. I think it's about who's going to help me. How do I ingratiate myself with this other human? This is laying the neural groundworks for being a cooperative person later on to understand the intentions of others, coming to trust others and learning that you can trust others or not.

18:53So this is where this comes from. And empathy is an excellent tool if we're able to see things from someone else's point of view, which you were asking me to do all the time and communicating with this audience. You're saying, well, try to see it from their perspective. That's what we could lose. I would hope that a message would be society has a responsibility for shared care and group care. I mean, this is a talk to linger on that it's as simple as responsiveness, that that's what the connection, the attachment is based on, is who is responding to this baby. that is really a stop and stare moment for me.

19:45Like we have to look at that squarely, accept the fact of it and operate accordingly. To say that I'm worried about it is true, but you know, I'm 80 years old. I'm a dinosaur. I'm not adapted to this world. It's changing. So at the beginning of mother nature, I said, you know, here I am, this mammal with the ovaries of an ape and the brain of a homo sapiens trying to adapt to a world that's changing fast. Well, guess what? Quarter of a century later, it's changing even faster. And every day is the source of new frustration for me. And I feel less, I feel dehumanized. Because if we set up a bunch of AI robots that give a baby and a toddler everything he or she wants along the way, we will for sure be changing the species.

20:37And that is a big deal. I'm worried because the products of AI are so addictive. And we may lose something and not even realize what we're missing enough to rebel. That's the scary part. But there were some high-tech guys who really seemed to think that more technology was the answer, right? And I wonder if they realize the power of what they're dealing with. The thing you taught me is that we are an other-regarding species. That is like this definitional thing about us. So if that's true, could we count on it to save us from this like... No, because it's not innate. Damn it, Sarah. That's not the answer I was looking for.

21:30I want to end this on a positive. so over the course of this whole project my little cohort of speakers these six people really fell in love with each other you were so amazing though the entire way she putting it through and everything it was just so great i mean there was so much support and love backstage for one another and sarah was like the the leader you know she was like the emotional moral center of Team Corrigan. We need to make t-shirts. We need merch. We need like inner fish, inner mother. Like there's so many lines that have come up that would make like the best bumper stickers and t-shirts.

22:09And she was so gracious about saying how much she learned from the rest of us. And I think that is really humanity at its best. Sarah, you mischievous. You're like 18 at heart. Don't you feel that way? Until I looked at that lady, but yeah. So thank you for bringing so much credibility and background and history and research into our team. And thank you, Kelly, for your meaningful mentoring and for really creating this community among us, which is kind of an art. You brought out our humanity. You reminded us, oh, you're human.

23:03And that's it for today. Come back tomorrow for a conversation and a talk with a woman who has led two very different lives, Danini Kimisera-Sikar. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and mixed by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the TED Research Team. The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estopinos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sungmar Nivang. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezo. I'm Kelly Corrigan, guest host of TED Talks Daily, here for a special week of content around the topic of AI and family life.

23:49Thanks for listening. And please join me at my podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders, wherever you listen to podcasts. I'll be back tomorrow. Thanks for listening.

24:03We'll do that. That's no problem. Although, I mean, I should just say, Sarah, we can change your life here with Google Docs. Okay. I'm going to send you one just in case you love it instantly okay okay but we will send you the word docs to make it your life easier so you're not adapting to a new format just for us um and then um and we can meet anytime in between in between those drafts so i the ideal situation would be kind of like three great back and forths on your draft before march and i will probably end up thinking why didn't i learn these life skills from Chloe and Kelly soon. I'm age 80 before I learn them.

24:47Okay.