There was a fish on my walk today, camouflaged at the edge of the water line. He moved imperceptibly, barely visible to the naked eye between the algae-covered leaves and twigs. When the current shifted, his body shivered and swayed forward. In the span of several minutes, he steadily followed the curve of the shoreline without moving a muscle. Each gust of wind propelled his small body forward, forward. When I stepped to follow him, he darted and was gone.

Perhaps the fish did not move forward through any force of logical thought. He merely was, and then he was somewhere else, carried by instinct and the current and the shape of the pond and the bend in the shoreline.

When I think of the fish in the pond swaying, I see the curve of a woman’s body, wrapped in that water pulling forward, forward. In the labour and delivery of my children, my body shifted and twisted beyond recognition through no particular force of logical thought; it happened to me. And in caring for my children, my body moved toward orientation to another’s body through no particular force of logical thought. I loved, and so then I cared, became one who cared and was caring for.

I care, therefore I am.

I am that fish suspended in the current of my care, moving forward, forward. Who I have become requires much less thinking than I assumed it would when I was younger. When I touch the cheek of my child to check for a fever’s heat, it is a reflex. When I cradle my newborn and encourage him to nurse, it is a habit. I am not thinking. I am simply there, and when we breathe, our breath draws in together, rising and falling.

The pervasive seep of artificial intelligence into our daily interactions has caused an identity crisis, particularly among those who believe that what we think makes us who we are. If AI can beat us at parsing Latin, calculating mathematics, diagnosing rare diseases, or interpreting a text from our lover, perhaps it is indeed human. This recognition has caused existential searching, and even grief, among brain researchers. What they once believed was mysterious is now laid bare, because the inner workings of millions of synapses in the brain look suspiciously like the connection webs used by AI.

And yet. The care I provide as a mother is not primarily an exercise of the mind but one of presence; my powers of thought come alongside. It would hardly be possible to care for someone from afar: one can think of another when away, but someone must literally change the diaper.

My mom friends joke that in caring for children we have become dumber versions of ourselves, and scientifically there’s something to that—although I prefer to imagine ourselves not as dumbing down but as growing focused, streamlined, and rigorous in the biological pursuit of love unfolding before our eyes. A single-mindedness oriented toward the care of the other is all-consuming. Telling new moms to think of something other than the baby is comical. Can’t you tell when a woman is working? I am on the clock, and it is the cries of another that keep the time.

Those who substitute a facet of human ability for the whole miss the point. What makes us human is our ability to love.

What AI cannot do is be present alongside the sick, the dying, the needy, and the lonely. When it is there, it lurks, a farce. AI pantomimes the real, caricatures the soul, and offers a poor replacement for the care that women stake off as their own, claim as our birthright.

I saw a video in which a humanoid robot tries to load the dishwasher. The machine’s ergonomic sensibilities are both insipid and hilarious. My eight-month-old has more bodily awareness. Because, of course, the robot is not a body, just a computer and some metal.

It is funny when applied to dishwashing but much less so when applied to, say, performing a clinical physical examination on my profoundly disabled son, or helping an elderly man with dementia button his shirt.

A fourth-year medical student I know spends her limited free time, in between interviewing for emergency-medicine residencies and finishing clinical rotations, voluntarily caring for a man with dementia. At our local coffee shop, she handed him off to another medical student who had the next shift with him. These two brilliant young women, beautiful and shining in their youth, spend their time holding his hand to walk down the brick pathway. I know this care, and I respect these women more for doing that marvellous and unseen labour more than for their remarkable professional promise.

My son David is in school surrounded by a sea of women. He is in kindergarten. They change his diaper and his clothes and make their hands into supports so he can walk when he’s with them, his women. He will never talk, walk, or eat independently. He is beloved. It is a woman’s world, this school, it is their world, and through the labour of their hands and the sweat of their bodies they make him move, and eat, and walk, and be. I would saint all of them.

In the delivery room with my fifth child, a woman delivered me, a physician with ten of her own children. She was tender but exacting and firm, and she pulled my son from me and handed him to me. The nurses rubbed and smacked my son to breathe so that he wailed and we were relieved and laughing and crying, a bunch of women well satisfied with the work of our hands.

I told my husband that next time I would be fine delivering alone, thanks. Just give me my sisters.

The massage therapist clicks her tongue at me and tells me that my body is depleted. It has been doled out a time too many; it is roped and sinewed and knotted into twisted lumps, and it hurts. She pulls and pushes skin and muscle to the bone. I comment again and again how when she touches me in one place I feel it elsewhere. It’s connected, she explains, exasperated. It’s all connected. It is then I remember that the body is a biosphere, ecosystems converging and collapsing boundaries so that to touch one place is to touch the whole. The body responds because it is alive; skin is a fabric that breathes, covering a galaxy underneath.

I gave up the idea long ago that thinking is being—about the time my son was born and it was said that he wouldn’t think, or much anyway, that he would die, that he would never do those things my other children do so easily, like run and jump and lick an ice cream cone or sing the ABCs. When I looked at him, I realized that nothing separates us but a couple of anatomical anomalies, and it’s just window dressing anyway. If the ability to meet a certain standard of thinking is a precondition for initiation into recognizable humanity, count me out. I won’t make the cut.

My father-in-law recently divorced my mother-in-law. He has dementia and yet still seems so competent that the legal system pushed it through. He is now utterly alone. He cannot even shower reliably. He lives in a world of his own making, fed by his own delusions. Yet he needs his wife, my mother-in-law, now his ex-wife. She was the first call when he passed out and hit his head, needed stitches and a CT scan. He needs her to remind him how to get cash from an ATM, how to pay his bills, how to get into his email. It’s true that these are skills that AI could assist with, giving clear directions, aiding his executive functioning. I can see how it would even be helpful to have a camera on him, in his home, observing for his safety. But a system knows only what it is told. My father-in-law has become an unreliable narrator of his own life, his own values, his own faith. He believes God told him to divorce his wife. What system of AI could remain so compassionate as to still take his calls when he’s removed her from his health care and is suing her for more than half of their assets, after thirty-five years of marriage? Compassion extracts a human cost. It is not free. The good Samaritan paid for the care of the Jew. There was a cost to his care of the other, and he bore it. ChatGPT, always the sycophant, would flatter and preen my father-in-law, feeding his delusions right back to him. This is not compassion; this helpfulness is a pantomime, for there is no one to bear the cost. What program would sit beside him in the emergency room, waiting for his stitches, and listen to him ramble on in his delusions?

A screen can’t sit. My mother-in-law can, and she did and she does.

My son’s pediatrician, nearing seventy, retired this year after decades of caring for medically fragile and vulnerable children. It’s true that AI will write better notes, will never tire, will never retire, and has a world of knowledge available in an instant. But what it cannot do is touch my son, come to the hospital on the day of his birth, stay up late into the night looking for clues about his case.

AI cannot labour for him, cannot spend itself at the expense of someone else. Information is plentiful and cheap. It costs nothing of itself. There is no labour.

When my girls play together, they are constantly touching. Last night they shared one twin bed, one at one end and one at the other. They’ve recently become entranced by doing “makeup” with a play set, taking turns painting each other’s faces with hearts and flowers. Their play is without rules as they practice physical transformation, touching each other to bring about something new and wiping it off and then beginning again.

They have dolls and play games about people with animals and furniture, re-creating the vignettes of their own lives.

When I grow up, Mama, one says, I’ll have a baby just like you. They do not know much yet about the world. But what they do know is that their small world revolves in and around and through touch. It is through touch that they know and are known. They have not been inducted into this strange new world where we know things and there is no touch at all. No one is there on the other side. For now there is one sister and then another, and through their faces and their hands they build their little lives, whole and perfect and unmarred by what they do not know.

My grandfather died a few winters ago, and on the day of his death I was with him. I helped him turn over in the hospital bed so that the dressings could be changed on his bedsores. He had become particularly attached to one girl as he was losing his memory and his senses from dementia. She was black and I am white, but he called her Rachel and thought she was me, his favourite granddaughter. In a way she was, because she was there, caring for him, and so I am glad he mistook us for each other and made us into each other, the two Rachels caring for one man, our labours converging onto one plane such that there was just one Rachel, really, the one who cared.

Today I am fighting with my son’s medical equipment stacked in our dining room. The linen-covered dining chairs make a maze with the medical equipment and David’s unholy amount of light-up toys. Light-up musical baby toys are typically an abomination. But for David they are a joy.

When I push one of his pieces of equipment—the one that keeps him upright—back into place after his G-tube feeding, a wheel comes off and I curse. When I push his equipment around and around playing musical chairs in my dining room, I am caring for my son. For now at least, AI cannot strap my son into his feeding equipment and push it back into place. For today, that work is mine.

I like having my miraculous son alive, and when I push the equipment, I am grateful and cry in gratitude. For now at least, a computer cannot cry in gratitude because their son who was supposed to die is living and eating and thriving.

Women’s work is a terrible thing to behold. Recently I saw two women working in the physical therapy clinic where I often go with my son. One woman held a boy, and the other made casts for his legs, wrapping long strips of cloth around and around, strips that would harden onto the boy’s legs and make them stretch.

The one holding the boy down as he cried had taken a call to raise the boy in foster care, and the therapist wrapping and casting his legs had treated the boy as a patient for years.

I watched the two women work. I found myself crying at the boy, his legs, the two women and the casts. I was in awe of the coursing strength between these two women surrounding the boy, and I saw that boy lifted up, suspended in their care.

Technological progress has resulted in the casts that help the boy walk and also computers that simulate the human mind such that major companies have announced a growth trajectory without plans to hire human labour.

Will people still work? Those two women are still working. Their work will not end. The work of touch, of care, of answering a call in the middle of the night and taking a child cannot be subsumed by our technicoloured dreams for a future where humans merely leisure.

That’s a man’s world, a man’s dream. That world is no place for women and children.

I am not replaceable. What I give of myself to my children is not replaceable. A mother’s love is not replaceable. It cannot be made by superior intelligences in the dark pathways of data centres. Even this, what I write, can be replaced, replicated, edited, and remade by AI. But it cannot be lived. That work is mine.

Those preoccupied with the ills of the rise of artificial intelligence—and there are ills—need to practice touching other bodies, that work women were made to do. The poor will always be with us. The elderly and the sick will remain. There will always be Davids enough to go around. The harvest is ripe, but the workers are few.

The work is ours to do. It’s going nowhere fast.