Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Oh, that's a lovely way to put it.

Well, if you ask me, 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 genetic parent.

I 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.

Never?

I guess you've already figured out, like it or not, artificial intelligence is going to change the nature of human work.

But 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.

It 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.