TED Talks Daily
Are we still human if robots help raise our babies? | Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Kelly Corrigan takeover)
06 May 2025
AI is transforming the way we work — could it also reshape what makes us human? In this quick and insightful talk, evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy explores how the human brain was shaped by millions of years of shared childcare and mutually supportive communities, asking a provocative question: If robots help raise the next generation, will we lose the empathy that defines us?This is episode three of a seven-part series airing this week on TED Talks Daily, where author, podcaster and past TED speaker Kelly Corrigan — and her six TED2025 speakers — explore the question: In the world of artificial intelligence, what is a parent for?To hear more from Kelly Corrigan, listen to Kelly Corrigan Wonders wherever you get your podcasts, or at kellycorrigan.com/podcast.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm Kelli 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. Sarah 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 the six million year look at us as a species and our evolution and the way that we have typically raised children. And there's something about Sarah, really.
She has such a twinkle in her eye. She's such a happy girl. academic. This is what she was born to do, was take on really big, weird questions like this. Okay. 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 themselves. to people who are not their mother. Sarah 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.
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