The Future Speaks: A Scientist and an Artist Have a Baby and Name Her Futura
A New Year’s Chat with Futura, Age 14 Days—and Her Parents, Biotech Entrepreneur Riccardo Sabatini and Artist Olivia Ives-Flores | And from my archives"Teddy Bear Bot" Talking to Robots (Dutton 2019)
Futura, 14 days old.
In this issue of FUTURES
Theme: Futura
New Essay: Welcome to 2025, Futura, Hope for Humanity in a Fraught World (Not Too Much Pressure) by David Ewing Duncan
Q&A: Futura with Her Mom and Dad
From my Archives: “Teddy Bear Bot,” an excerpt from Talking to Robots: Tales from Our Robot-Human Futures (Dutton), By David Ewing Duncan, 2019
FUTURES is a column and a newsletter about possible futures at a pivotable moment in history, where the future could turn out wondrous—or not. I’m asking the most fascinating people I can find what they are most excited about and most afraid of for the future, and why.
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New Essay
The Future Speaks: A Scientist and an Artist Have a Baby and Name Her Futura
A New Year’s Conversation about the next 100+ Years with Futura, Age 14 Days—and Her Parents, Biotech Entrepreneur Riccardo Sabatini and Artist Olivia Ives-Flores
by David Ewing Duncan—January 9, 2025
Having a baby in the mid-2020s is an article of faith in a world that seems teetering towards a future that is… what? Wondrous? Scary? Apocalyptic?
To name this brand new human Futura, Italian for “woman of the future,” is making a bold statement that things may turn out okay, although that’s a lot to hang on a two-week-old baby’s tiny shoulders. But meeting Futura the day after Christmas in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I felt it already—that this girl represents hope for a positive future and for a world we want for her and for everyone else.
Futura’s parents, who are professed optimists, see a world that makes them both excited and anxious as they answer the question that I pose to every guest appearing in this column: What are you most excited about and most afraid of for the future? In this case the question could be modified to: What are you most excited about and most afraid of for Futura? Because she is just two weeks old and still speaks baby—which we adults have alas forgotten—I asked her mom and dad, Riccardo and Olivia, to fill in for their daughter.
In the conversation below, we talk about the perils of social media and the wonders and benefits of being bored and offline back before our attention and our children’s attention was stolen by a constant barrage of notifications, posts, micro-videos, and all the rest. (By the way check out an excellent article on this topic that ran last weekend in the New York Times, “I want Your Attention. Here Is How I Mastered My Own—The problem we face is existential and spiritual, not situational,” by Chris Hayes).
We also discussed how a scientist and an artist hope to balance their worlds of science and art in the life of their daughter, and to show her how both can be creative and influence each other in profound ways. Already, Riccardo is being the data and technology guy who wants to measure and monitor Futura’s health every which way, while Olivia wants Futura to follow her intuition and to let her be. Riccardo for his part wants Futura to embrace and appreciate technology at its best but also wants this tech to be gentle and designed to optimize her life—something he’s worried about even as he remains a dedicated technologist, as he says.
We didn’t discuss politics much, although the rise of authoritarianism was on the minds of Futura’s parents, as is the future of the United States as a place of opportunity and hope for an immigrant like Riccardo and the daughter of an immigrant father like Olivia.
For this and more, check out this special New Year’s Q&A below with Futura and her parents, offered up as an appreciation to you, my readers, who have followed these columns throughout 2024. I also appreciate the people who agreed to be interviewed, including everyone from geneticist George Church and Oceanographer Sylvia Earle to Physicist Neil de Grass Tyson, opera legend Renee Fleming, and futurist Kevin Kelly, among others. The column has had great open rates and we’ve seen a big surge in subscriptions since launched a year ago, which I’m grateful for.
Please share the column with your friends and ask them to subscribe. (You can check out all the columns here). Also consider moving to a paid subscription. It’s cheap and, as I’m sure you’re aware, journalism as a business is teetering. So every little bit helps to support what I hope is quality writing and journalism by considering a paid sponsorship if you like what you read.
Also please share your thoughts with me on the columns you liked and those you scratched your head about—and let me know what column subjects or interview subjects that you’d like to see more of.
And Happy 2025!
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Q&A: Baby Futura and Her Dad and Mom—Riccardo Sabatini and Olivia Ives-Flores
The Discussants:
Futura Sabatini-Flores is 14 days old.
Riccardo Sabatini is an Italian scientist and entrepreneur, and the Chief Data Scientists for Orionis Biosciences, which is developing targeted drugs for cancer and other maladies using precision medicine and AI.
Olivia Ives-Flores is a Cuban-American artist, curator, and entrepreneur, and the founder and creative director of the Oh! Art Agency.
David Ewing Duncan is a writer and author and the host of this column.
The Conversation
David Ewing Duncan: Futura, let me ask you the question I ask all my guests for this column. What are you most excited about and most afraid of for the future? (Since you’re only two weeks old and still speaking baby, I'm going to have to ask your parents for an assist here).
Olivia Ives-Flores: we're still getting to know each other, but I'm quite certain that she knows some of the greatest secrets and mysteries of the world. She might be forgetting some of this later, but she came from another place into this world, and she really had a directive. I think her answer will be quite profound at this point.
Riccardo Sabatini: What do you feel, mama? You give birth to the future—what you feel she's going to see and what do you think it's going to be there for her?
Olivia: We don't really know exactly what she's thinking in that little mind of hers. But she’s definitely going to see a different world. Even if it's the same, I think she'll have a new perspective and hopefully that's part of the lens that we’re giving her as her parents—showing her the world, exposing her to different colors and textures and art and science and technology, but also a cultural lens and making sure that she's able to engage in the world with both Muse and method, muse being the art. I hope my biggest gift for her is to help develop her imagination because I do think imagination could be in peril with so much technology, especially for children watching shows and having things that are sort of laid out for you. I think it's important to have space to fill in the gaps and to imagine the space in between. So that's something that I really want to focus on cultivating for Futura, and I am the art, and the science is her father. I'm excited to see where that middle ground is, how does that manifest for her?
Futura: Peep
David: Did she just say something?
Riccardo and Olivia: Yes!
David: Riccardo, how would you answer the question?
Riccardo: While we were pregnant, we thought a bunch of what will change and how fast it will change. One thing that we found very interesting is that the average reproductive rate is many counties is 1.3 percent. So populations are shrinking. She will live in a world where kids will be more and more special just by the sheer number. Not long ago, child mortality was just super common. Now these kids are really the incarnation of everything special in our hopes and dreams just because also there are many less. I am an optimist by myself and Olivia as well, so we try to imagine a future that is bright and easier and a series of possibilities.
I'm an immigrant and I came in United States, she is starting out an American, and that's a big step. She is in a land of possibilities, and even if this is more conflictual time, with the last decade having so many social dilemmas, she will have access to more opportunities than we had when we were kids. She can learn much faster and much deeper topics. She will hopefully have access to a more global world.
David: Let me rephrase the question a little bit. What are your hopes and fears for Futura?
Olivia: I was thinking of when Riccardo was saying how the population is going down, and it's true, at the same time we're in an epidemic of loneliness. I feel that in our immediate community there are fewer babies for many different reasons. I think in the future this will continue to be more prevalent because there's people who are holding off on having kids, not having them at all. We don't really have peers as young parents, but what I've found is how vital the village is. How vital is it to come together around whatever the hearth is of the village. In this case, at this moment in time, this has been Futura, it's been just incredible to see people from all different parts of our lives come together around her.
I think what I'm optimistic about and simultaneously—not fearful of, but conscious of—is how we are socializing her to be part of a community, so she is not lonely. This is an ultimate fear. I would not wish loneliness on anyone. For me it’s about the gathering and social integration at a time where we are so connected with technology, but clearly we're also very divided and separated. I want her to be a person of the world. I really want her to be able to travel freely and see people as they are not through divisions.
David: Was this sort of socialization part of your upbringing?
Olive: Oh yeah, absolutely. Family was a big part of my upbringing, but also friends. And I think that's less about a cultural heritage and more about a creative upbringing because both of my parents are artists. There was this sense of the artist community, which we were a part of, and then also artists gather at art openings. I also had my father taking me to the Metropolitan Museum, and these are things that we're trying to do for her as well. So today I took her to the Harvard Art Museum and I was talking to her about the art as if she understood.
I think that's important to be having a constant dialogue with your child. And I didn't state it as a fear. We also have other issues we are putting down on paper of what we do if we run into this or that. How are we going to think about religion? How are we thinking about education? These are things that Ricardo and I are constantly in dialogue about. But we are entrepreneurs, so we see problems as opportunities. As an artist, I see limitations as an opportunity to be resourceful.
David: Do you worry that problems in the world are getting worse?
Olivia: We are becoming so siloed; you see this represented in data and demographics. We just went through a voting cycle, and I think that really compartmentalizes humans when actually different people’s stories are the building blocks of culture. You don't get a story through data and decimals. I really want to make sure that that's the blanket that we wrap around her is that she's aware of just the beautiful tapestry that is life and the beauty of people as well.
David: Ricardo, you are a scientist. How would you answer that question? Your hopes and fears for her in the future?
Riccardo: I think a lot about technology, but one fear is tribalism, technological driven tribalism. I’m a technologist. I love technology, I will love to give technology to my daughter, but there is also a very unique edge of social interactions online, which right now is a bit bizarre, they are very tribal. You can create with a click or an issue a microscopical world that becomes extremely important. You end up in an echo chamber of that tiny little word and you lose perspective of what you have around you.
I thought was back in the day that the Internet was an engine of democratization, but it’s become more of an engine of tribalization. And that is something that makes me a little bit worried, how to give Futura a healthy access to technology. Silicon Valley is very good at modulating our dopamine, and I'm not super convinced that this is something I love to flood my brain with. I want Futura to be a technology baby, but I want to find gentle technologies that allow her to be bored, and allow her to use her imagination, and to maintain the humanity that I grew up with, that is connected more to society, planet, nature.
David: So technology no longer supporting this humanity and connectiveness?
Riccardo: Not enough.
David: Social media seems more and more driven by profit instead of optimizing people. How can we turn these technologies around to optimize people rather than just making a profit?
Riccardo: Technology tends to remove a few things that I think are simple but important. Number one, it's impossible to get bored when you’re constantly flooded by stuff online. But getting bored was such an important component of my life. It generated a lot of interactions with friends, and we used our imaginations, and it was less about dopamine hits and more about being social, that’s what I want to find a way to try for her to feel.
David: Olivia was just saying she wants to create a kind of magic for Futura. Is this part of being bored in the good way?
David: By the way, why did you name your wee one Futura?
Riccardo: It was my mom. Here’s the story. Futura is a female Italian name that means the woman from the future, the female version of the future. And this is because my mom was one of the very first women that accessed graduate studies in Italy. She was studying ancient literature and Sanskrit at Bologna in 1968. There was a famous singer there called Lucio, a friend of my mom, who wrote a song about a daughter that will be able to swim on the moon or swim on a star—that daughter will represent a future so bright that we will be able to do this, and this daughter will be named Futura. My mom loved it. My mom is now older and an Alzheimer's patient, so she can't recognize us, but when we showed her Futura, her face lit up. So as a pledge to her memory, we decided this daughter is going to be called Futura, and she'll swim on the moon and the stars.
David: Riccardo, you're working on treatments for cancer and other diseases. Are you thinking that any differently now that you have Futura?
Riccardo: Oh yeah. When you are in the field you're always connected to the technology and to the personal part. People knowing that you work in oncology text you for help, and these interactions are very personal, I want to help, but they're also professional. But it's a completely different domain where I think of potentially her getting sick, it's a totally different domain of reaction.
David: So more personal?
Riccardo: I'll be as professional as I can, but it’s different. We had a little bit of a taste of how we will use technology during the pregnancy. We started to review what are the best options to give her an outcome that is good. We looked into probiotics and asked: is there real science there or not? What about prenatal vitamins? And I ended up in kind of a little bit of a whirlwind of obsession over getting ready for her I started to buy every single camera that there was and monitoring device, and I found a little sock that you attach to the foot and it gives you her temperature, heartbeat.
David: This is you going full on quantified self and being a bit of a tech geek?
Riccardo: Yeah, and a hypochondriac. They're all great technologies and I'm sure that they will get better and better and better, but I never felt this before. The tension of preventative versus reactive. And I’d love to find a balance on how much testing and how much technology I want to introduce her to, to introduce our family to. I will have to dominate my obsession of prevention, to strike a balance between accepting some risk and living the life with a preparation of thinking positive rather than being always in the, let's say, preparation for the negative.
David: You take risks as an entrepreneur. Are you looking at that differently when you thinking of her?
Riccardo: Oh my god so much. Because you always think that you can carry on your shoulder as much risk as you want. Instead, you see this tiny little shoulder and say, oh my God, I have to lift all the risk that I can possibly lift from her. I have to give her the safety net, but also let her learn to take risks.
David: So you’re the detail person, the worrier. Olivia, does that make you the one who says: let’s be calm and just let her do her thing?
Olivia: I'm really tapping into my instinct—and that's where we meet in the middle. There's have been several instances where they're like, we can pursue this deeper, we can do more invasive testing, and we discuss it. And then ultimately there is a lot of space on the table for instinct as well.
David: So how you make a prediction? Is Futura going to be an artist or an engineer? Or maybe a bioengineer, or something totally different? Any clues after 14 days?
Olivia: there are so many careers that don't even exist now that she could be. I don't know. I get a sense that there's something about performance. I get a sense there's a performer in there because in the womb she was really responsive. My father is an artist, and he says that
when you look at a painting, you can see in a way the character of the artist by looking at brush strokes. I was feeling that when she was in me, I could get a sense of her character.
David: How do you think Futura will view this conversation where you're talking about what she might be?
Olivia: If she's anything like us, she'll have her own opinions.
Riccardo: I think we can influence a little bit, but she will decide. It’s a big question, how much is nurture, how much is nature—who she already is.
Olivia: The world is truly what you make of it. There are endless possibilities. But I think what we're finding in this conversation is that at the core of it, I think if you keep love, a love for other people, a love for storytelling, a love for getting your hands in the dirt, it's going to be fine. I think that's what life is about. It's about holding things that are totally different. Joy and sorrow. The future and the present, both in the palm of your hands at the same time.
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From My Archives—Book Chapter
Teddy Bear Bot
In the future, our children will love their AI-powered Teddy Bots. What could possibly go wrong?
Chapter from Talking to Robots: Tales from Our Human Robot Futures (Dutton, 2019)
By David Ewing Duncan
“They will be part doll, part teddy bear, part pet, part security guard, part Aristotle, and part nanny.”
- Kevin Kelly (quoted in Talking to Robots)
In the future, those of us who were children when the first truly intelligent machines arrived will never forget our Teddy Bots. Those stuffed animal–robot hybrids that started out doing a few fun and smart things, like playing games and showing movies onto walls from bellybutton holo-projectors. Eventually, as they learned more about us, they used their advanced neural net processors to answer our little-kid questions about why the sun comes up, what causes rain, and where babies come from. For that last question, parents could choose how explicit Teddy could be by using the “parental settings” 3-D holo-app dashboard that came with every Bot.
Teddy Bots kept us safe, and we whispered our secrets to them. For some of us, this led to our first robot betrayal when we discovered that our snuggleable Teddy had been programmed to share our secrets with our mothers and fathers via the Parental Dashboard. For a short while, we kept our distance from Teddy, the trust having been shattered. But we loved our Teddy Bot too much. We responded to his (or her) sad expressions and “I miss you” entreaties by giving Teddy a big hug.
After we made up, Teddy explained that our parents had programmed him to “tell all.” So we forgave him and transferred our sense of betrayal to our parents. When we got a little older, Teddy taught us how to program him to delete the secret-sharing protocols. We were so relieved to be able to tell him our deepest personal thoughts once again, savoring our act of techno-rebellion that made us adore our Teddy Bot even more.
Our parents bought the first Teddy Bots as the latest must-have toy, like mothers and fathers once bought Mighty Morphin Power Ranger action figures. Because everyone else was buying one for their children, who would pout unless they got a Teddy Bot of their own. But since Teddys were truly intelligent robots, it quickly became apparent that they were different from mere toys. Only later did we realize that Teddy Bots would wield tremendous influence over both our children and the society our little tykes would inherit.
People first heard about Teddy Bots back in the Early Robot Era (ERE) from the futurist and writer Kevin Kelly. He dreamed them up one afternoon back in 2017, years before Teddy Bots were actually invented and sold to little humans. “They will be part doll, part teddy bear, part pet, part security guard, part Aristotle, and part nanny,” said Kelly as he pondered robots to come in his library-study in Pacifica, California, south of San Francisco. In part he was inspired by his own grandchildren and the toys he wished they had to play with but were not yet available. “I want to get a Teddy Bot for them now,” he said, sounding a bit like a big kid himself. “I’d want to ask it questions about the universe, and philosophy, and what it’s like to be a very smart robot.
“A Teddy Bot would provide an opportunity to shape a child,” continued Kelly, his white, inch-wide beard circling his chin like a second smile. Kelly’s most recent book back then was The Inevitable, where he suggested that highly intelligent robots, among other technological advances, were, well, inevitable. Teddy Bots were not in his book, but they easily could have been.
“Teddy Bots were foreshadowed by Teddy in the Spielberg film A.I.,” said Kelly, referring to an android teddy bear character in the 2001 sci-fi film directed by Steven Spielberg. In A.I. Teddy was the robot friend and protector of the android David, the film’s protagonist played by Haley Joel Osment, when he was about twelve years old and still at his Sixth Sense cutest.
Teddy Bot also harkens back to Robbie the Robot in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950), a metal nursemaid built by the fictional company U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men. Robbie has a “positronic brain,” a machine-mind made up by Asimov that provides his robots and androids with a consciousness and an ability to interact comfortably with humans—something real engineers in the twenty-teens didn’t have a clue how to make. In Asimov’s story, an eight-year-old girl becomes so attached to Robbie that her worried (and jealous) mother has him returned to the factory and replaces him with a collie. The little girl, named Gloria, becomes depressed at losing Robbie, which prompts her father to arrange for the family to “accidentally” bump into this kind and playful robot during an outing. When Robbie inevitably ends up saving little Gloria from getting injured, her mother gives in, and Robbie and Gloria are reunited. It’s not clear what happens to the collie.
“We aren’t prepared for how emotional we will be about our Teddy Bots,” said Kevin Kelly. “We will love them like we love our closest human friends, maybe more.” Kelly predicted that classic issues of child-rearing would crop up with Teddy Bots, like how to best discipline a wayward child or what to teach them about basic morals. “And whose morals would we use?” he asked. “Would they come from the corporations that make the Teddy Bots? Would they dictate how children are raised?” Or would parents have a menu of possibilities, depending on their own values? Kelly suspected that different bots would come preloaded with different personalities and that parents would have a choice, “like we choose different breeds of dogs or like how we choose a babysitter or a nanny.”
Kelly predicted that a whole slew of ethical quandaries would swirl around his imagined robot. “Do you have the Teddy Bot constantly praise the child, or are you tough? Would there be a Christian evangelical version or a Marin County version?” Meaning in the latter case a very liberal and affluent Teddy Bot, gluten-free and vegetarian, if not full vegan. “Or do we align them with a broader world perspective, if there is one?”
As the years rolled by, Kelly’s warnings about these predicaments were all too accurate when certain parents were caught reprogramming Teddy to teach their kids how to be white supremacists. This opened the floodgates for Teddy Bots being programmed to shape their tiny charges into radicals on the left or the right, or religious fanatics, or just plain fanatics. These efforts took on new and unforeseen dimensions as the bots’ machine-learning protocols kicked in and produced views too extreme even for their extremist parents, who often were just parroting what was said by certain politician bots and rabble-rousers (see “Politician Bot”) or by the talking-head bots on cable news (see “Journalism Bot”) anyway. This prompted some parents to hastily return their kids’ Teddy Bots to the company that made them, hoping that their wildly radicalized little scamps would be tempered by weekly visits to a psychiatrist bot. They tried to console their bereft children with collies, which worked about as well as it did in the Asimov story.
Some naughty children had no problem teaching their Teddy Bots to play pranks and to steal. Others inducted Teddy Bots into gangs and taught them to sell drugs. Fortunately, all non-military bots are programmed with Isaac Asimov’s first law of robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” This prevented Teddies from breaking kneecaps and committing other violent crimes, despite some clever attempts by gangs to deprogram the First Law and some robust debates about what exactly was meant by “to come to harm.”
Gangland Teddy Bots and others subverted to do no good by their human masters led to the great Teddy Bot backlash. Companies issued recalls on a mass scale and replaced the first wave of Teddy Bots with versions that were dumbed down and less independent. They were hardwired with simple protocols to keep our children safe and to do a few fun and smart things, like answering harmless little-kid questions and showing movies with nothing scarier than the sea witch in The Little Mermaid—which, by the way, is plenty scary. One popular option (for an additional charge) was the Mister Rogers Bot protocol, which allowed Teddy Bot to teach kindness and empathy, which was needed in the future as much as it was in the Early Robot Era (ERE). This had the unintended effect of reviving zip-up cardigans and house slippers as fashion statements— which wasn’t at all what people back in the early twenty-first century imagined the future would look like!
These new-version Teddy Bots were also reprogrammed to specifically be loved only by small nippers so that older children would outgrow them before they reached an age when they might want to pervert Teddy’s cute cuddliness. This meant that we got tired of our Teddy Bot as we got older, eventually getting embarrassed that we were still playing with little-kid toys. Poor Teddy Bot ended up sad and alone under a bed or in the back of a closet, suffering the same fate as old-fashioned stuffed animals when their children discarded them. The difference is that Teddy Bot’s one-thousand-year quantum battery kept him charged and ready to play, with an advanced AI mind that might or might not be conscious, with time on his hands, and nothing to do.
For more robots , order the book here in Hardcover or Paperback.
“Intensely readable, downright terrifying, and surprisingly uplifting.” - Vanity Fair
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