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