Any Star Trek fan will tell you that the sci-fi world has endured for so long because it illustrates an optimistic future where technology is a power for good. Inspired by this vision, Peter Diamandis, the famed XPrize founder and longevity guru, has launched a new three and a half million dollar FutureVision XPrize. The goal is to encourage more optimistic sci-fi worlds to come to our screens. Diamandis credits his entire career to watching Star Trek as a child. He says the show offered a hopeful vision of the future where humanity and technology collaborate, and it motivated him to work toward creating that future.
He observes that much of today’s science fiction in movies and TV is fixated on calamity, painting dystopian visions where technology is the cause of everything going wrong. From killer robots to dystopian artificial intelligence, examples include Black Mirror, Terminator, and Ex Machina. Diamandis questions why anyone would want to live in such a future. To counter this trend, he called upon friends including Rod Roddenberry, son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, billionaire Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, investor Cathie Wood, and contacts at Google. Together, they agreed to sponsor the new FutureVision XPrize.
This contest aims to encourage film creators to tell more stories about how good things can be in a technological future. Diamandis believes that if we can see a positive future, we will be inspired to build it. He notes the current growing uncertainty in people’s lives about jobs and the future, exacerbated by the speed of change and a constant stream of negative stories. However, he also points out another truth. Standing at the intersection of artificial intelligence and longevity, he knows it has never been easier for anyone with an idea to pursue it.
He states that the most powerful tools on the planet are free and available to everyone, referring to consumer artificial intelligence models from companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. This democratization and demonetization of problem-solving tools is, in his view, incredible. For example, in the field of longevity, which studies living longer and healthier, artificial intelligence is enabling a new understanding of our forty trillion human cells. Diamandis wants to see more of this kind of positive future portrayed on screen.
Interestingly, while he encourages contestants to use artificial intelligence tools for their projects, Diamandis warns that fully artificial intelligence-written and produced submissions, what he calls artificial intelligence slop, probably will not win. He advises that the humanity of the project is critically important. The FutureVision XPrize is being conducted with the help of the 100 ZEROS initiative, a partnership between Google and production company Range Media Partners that works with filmmakers to produce tech-inspired stories using Google’s tools.
Submissions open on March ninth and close on August fifteenth, with winners announced on September twenty-fifth. Each applicant will submit a three-minute trailer. Diamandis expects to flood YouTube with these submissions for public viewing and comment. Judges, led by the team at Range Media, will select a handful of submissions to receive funding to produce a ten-minute short film. The grand prize winner, chosen from these short films, will receive two and a half million dollars in production funding toward developing a feature film and a one hundred thousand dollar cash prize. The winning project is also expected to be featured on the crowdsourcing site Republic Film to help raise an additional five to ten million dollars for its production budget.
Diamandis notes that members of his Abundance community of CEOs have contributed nearly half the prize money, with about fifteen individuals participating. Other key donors include Andreessen Horowitz’s Ben Horowitz, Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb, and actor-producer Seth Green. Diamandis hopes this becomes a repeated contest. He aims to turn dread into what he calls an exponential mindset, which means having agency and feeling that the future is not happening to you, but for you.