Kelly Corrigan

That's a good scientist.

Not never, I guess.

Not 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 here is Sarah Hurdy giving us six million years of human evolution in nine minutes.

So 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 are

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.

You 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, whether that person or that thing is man or machine.