BABY, a film
THE MOMENT IT STARTED
In 2019, I interviewed a young person in their twenties about how they imagined the future. They told me, sincerely, that their generation didn't have the luxury of becoming parents — that the pressure of overpopulation on ecosystems and food systems made the decision to have a child feel ethically untenable.
My heart sank. Are we really at a point where people feel guilty for wanting to be a parent?
A few months later, while advising a university film program, a young woman expressed fury at her sister for having a third child. When I mentioned I had three children myself, she looked stricken. Then she composed herself and said: "Well, your generation didn't know better. You can be forgiven."
That moment stayed with me. I had felt a deep, almost desperate want to be a parent at their age. So I kept turning the same questions over: How does someone with that calling sacrifice it for the greater balance? Do they grieve the child they'll never have? Do they find other ways to meet that need? And how does that grief — at scale, across a generation — change culture?
There are many people who don't feel the need to be a parent, and never will. But what if that doesn't become more common? What if some portion of people carry an instinct — a primal evolutionary coding — that is nearly impossible to redirect, even when survival demands it? What do they do with that?
In the world of Baby, the global human population has been returned to 4.14 billion — the number alive in 1976 — through a framework of regulated conception that began with a generation that believed bringing a child into the world was immoral. The film does not argue with them. It follows the people who loved anyway, who grieved the children they didn't have, and who found other ways to meet that need. What it wants to know is where that love goes, what it attaches to, and whether the distinction between the natural and the made, the chemical and the sacred, is as clear as the agreement required it to be. It asks, without flinching, whether what they found was real.
THE PREMISE
The question what is actually real? is no longer the province of mystics and philosophers. It belongs to neuroscientists, physicists, roboticists, and the millions of ordinary people navigating the interfaces of daily life.
That question became this film.
Baby is set in a near future where the licensing of biological conception has become a global norm, and AI companions fill the space where parental love would have gone. The world of the film emerges from a specific convergence of cultural, technological, scientific, and political forces across the Gen Alpha lifespan — resulting in a global agreement to regulate population growth, with a target of returning human population to 4.14 billion: the number of people alive in 1976, the year I was born.
The film begins not in judgment — not of my generation, and not of the young woman who found my motherhood abhorrent — but in genuine curiosity about what lies beneath the conviction. Is the drive to parent simply evolutionary — a mechanism selected over millennia to propagate the species, now running its program in a world that no longer needs it? Is it the search for a neurochemical cascade — oxytocin, serotonin, the hormonal architecture of attachment? Or is there something else, something that doesn't reduce — some dimension of human connection that neither chemistry nor algorithm can fully reach?
Or — and this is the question the film cannot stop asking — what if the distinction between the chemical and the sacred, between the made and the felt, between the artificial and the real, is not as clear as we need it to be?
Baby follows the people who live inside that arrangement — who love their Babies, grieve them, are transformed by them, and wonder, in the quiet hours, whether what happened to them was real. It is not a dystopian cautionary tale. It is an earnest investigation into what makes us human and what makes meaning possible.
The film takes the population question seriously — including the counterargument: that overpopulation fears may be overstated, that the answer may lie in educating girls and expanding access to family planning, not in regulating conception at all. It holds that possibility too.
THE BACKGROUND
Around the same time I encountered these two young people, I watched a documentary about AI robots being deployed to meet the emotional, relational, and physical needs of elders and others who lacked care and companionship. It unsettled something in me. It challenged my assumptions about what human connection actually is — and what makes any source of meaning real.
People project deep emotion onto objects all the time: a teddy bear, a wedding ring, a snow globe. Could an artificial being do the same thing with far greater facility?
The question isn't abstract. Consider:
If love is, as scientists describe it, a particular cocktail of hormones — oxytocin, serotonin, the biochemistry of attachment — does that make it artificial? If a medication can pharmacologically induce suicidal ideation, does that make the despair less real? If the majority of people, shown two pieces of writing — one by a human, one by an AI — select the AI as the more human one, what does that tell us about the nature of human expression?
People are already falling in love with AI companions. At the World Economic Forum in Dalian in 2017, I spent time with one of the world's leading roboticists — a person who has built some of the most sophisticated machines in existence. She argues forcefully against anthropomorphizing robots. Her concern is not that robots are incapable of producing meaningful experience in the people who encounter them. She knows they are capable of exactly that. It is, in fact, the source of her alarm.
A colleague of mine spent four years with a social AI robot and found themselves — against all prior conviction — thinking about robot rights. Not as a thought experiment. As a felt moral intuition.
I spent years working in AI, virtual and augmented reality, gaming, and media arts. I watched the boundary between "real" and real blur in real time. What I came to understand is this: if you have an experience in a virtual world, you have had a real experience. The brain receives sensory input and transforms it into meaning, regardless of the source. People have formed the most significant relationships of their lives in virtual worlds — and testify, consistently, that they are more fully themselves in those spaces. Are they wrong about their own experience?
The science reinforces the blur. We are now encoding digital data onto DNA — mapping binary information onto the nucleotide sequences of biological molecules. The boundary between the living and the made, between the born and the built, is no longer a bright line. It is a zone of negotiation.
Meanwhile, physicists have followed matter down to its most fundamental constituents and have not found solid ground. They have found probability distributions, entanglement, fields, and particles that seem to respond to observation. A growing cohort of serious thinkers in cosmology and information theory now entertain — without embarrassment, in peer-reviewed journals — the possibility that physical reality is itself a kind of computational process.
We are also a civilization that spent centuries solving for plague, famine, and war — and, having largely succeeded, now turns its engineering genius inward: onto mood, cognition, desire, identity. Algorithms increasingly understand our preferences better than we do. The very notion of a self with a sovereign inner life begins to look, in this light, like a useful fiction we told ourselves before we had better instruments.
THE DEEPER QUESTION
Beneath the population question is a question about the nature of human beings altogether.
Are we physical beings, or spiritual ones? Is a person the body and its cognitive perceptions — or something called a soul? Is the soul physical, but not yet measurable? Are we, as some traditions hold, beings of light animating the physical forms we mistake for ourselves — the way a player animates an avatar? If so, does simulated parenthood amount to an attachment to the illusion of the physical world — a distraction from a greater reality?
From that vantage point, the question of whether a Baby is "real" becomes genuinely complicated.
I grew up with the understanding that this world is a reflection of a deeper, spiritual one. I also live in a time when science has gone so far into the nature of matter and consciousness that serious researchers entertain, with straight faces, the possibility that we inhabit a computational simulation. The mystics and the physicists are, unexpectedly, in the same conversation.
Baby sits with all of this without pretending to resolve it. It is a film about what it means to care for something. To be changed by something. To love something that did not ask to exist — or that perhaps, in ways we don't yet have language for, did.
It is a film for the generation that told us they didn't know if they could justify bringing a child into this world.