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

Episode Date: May 6, 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Morgan from Off the Shelf and I'm here to tell you how my Google Pixel 9 helps me read more. Google actually gifted me this phone and now I use it non-stop. The other day, I was trying to remember the name of this book someone recommended and instead of spiraling into a 40 minute social media scroll, I just asked Gemini on my Pixel. What's that romantic book with a competition and a ghost helping her through the trials? The book you're likely thinking of is Phantasma by Kaylee Smith. Here's a breakdown of why it fits your description. It's like having that one friend who always knows what you're talking about. Learn more about the Google Pixel 9 at store.google.com. This show is sponsored by Aura Frames.

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to get $45 off plus free shipping on their best-selling Carver Mat Frame. That's A U R A frames dot com. Use promo code talks. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this episode comes from Airbnb. Winter always makes me dream of a warm getaway. Imagine this, toes in the sand, the sound of the waves, and nothing on the agenda except soaking up the sun. I think of myself in the Caribbean, sipping on a frozen drink and letting my troubles melt into the sea.

Maybe Jamaica, Turks and Caicos, St. Lucia. Lots of possibilities for me and my family to explore. But vacations always fly by too quickly. I was planning my next getaway when I realized my home will be sitting empty while I'm away. That's why I've been thinking about hosting on Airbnb. It'll allow me to earn extra income and could help me extend that trip just a little longer. One more sunset, one more amazing meal, one more day to unwind. It sounds like the smart thing to do and I've heard it's easy to get started. Your home might be worth more than

you think. Find out how much at www.arabianbee.ca. You'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 Hue 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 socio-biology. 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 eyes. 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, but let me ask this, like 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 Sarah's so fun to work with because

to people who are not their mother. Sarah's 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 gonna 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, and 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. 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 aloe 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? Ha ha ha ha! That's a good scientist. Not never, I guess not never. She had this huge smile in the call and 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 Hurte, I think all serious inquiries about what's right for humanity should include a world-class anthropologist. So here is Sarah Hurte giving us six million years of human evolution in nine minutes.

Applause 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. 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. 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. Fortunately 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.

Aloe mothers were in short supply. Good daycare, even if available, unaffordable. No wonder parents everywhere use devices to keep their babies monitored and entertained. Already, 40 percent of US 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. Right after birth, others might reach for the baby.

Allows others to gather round, 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 premasticated meat. And babies soon are learning to reciprocate, starting to share. Babies everywhere 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. They 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. Nothing much different there. It's in these social realms where they really differ. Innersubjective 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 Aiensis 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. But 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. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back after a short break. 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 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. 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. Couldn'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 Mombotter 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 mombat. What does he know about love and human emotions? What if you were to create the mombat? Someone who does know about love and human emotion. You couldn't pay me enough to do it. You could. What if someone just like you would be amenable to the job? The other huge takeaway I had from Sarah is that of course once you settle into her talk you're thinking we are 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. In 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 contexts where that would be advantageous.

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. So 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, we'll 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. It is really a stop and stare moment for me. Like 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 that'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 a 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 here she wants along the way. We will for sure be changing the species. And 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 an... Damn it, Sarah. That's not the answer I was looking for. I 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, snuffing it through and everything. Yeah, it's just so great. I mean, there was so much support and love

backstage for one another. And Sarah was like the leader. She was like the emotional moral center of Team Corrigan. We need to make t-shirts. Back to the great mother. We need merch. We need like inner fish, inner mother. There's so many lines that have come up

that would make the best bumper stickers and t-shirts. And 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're 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. And 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-Sikhar. 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 Estophanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sangmarnivong. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniella Belarezo. 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. Thanks 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. We'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 your life easier so you're not adapting to

a new format just for us. And then, and we can meet anytime in between in between those drafts. So 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, but okay. Hi, it's Morgan from Off the Shelf, and I'm here to tell you how my Google Pixel 9 helps me read more. Google actually gifted me this phone, and now I use it nonstop. The other day, I was trying to remember the name of this book someone recommended, and instead of spiraling into a 40 minute social media scroll

I just asked Gemini on my pixel. What's that romantic book with a competition and a ghost helping her through the trials? The book you're likely thinking of is phantasma by Kaylee Smith. Here's a breakdown of why it fits your description It's like having that one friend who always knows what you're talking about Learn more about the Google pixel 9 at store.google.com Audible invites you to listen for the thrill. Escape the everyday with stories that leave you breathless. Whether it's heart-pounding suspense like the Audible original's 10 Rules for the Perfect Murder by James Patterson, or the downloaded with Brendan Fraser. Or how about a fantasy adventure like Onyx Storm orilia Hart's The Sirens. Audible has an

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