Any Star Trek fan will tell you the series has endured because it illustrates an optimistic future where technology is a power for good. Inspired by this vision, Peter Diamandis has launched a new three and a half million dollar FutureVision Xprize to encourage more optimistic science fiction worlds to come to our screens. He credits his entire career to watching Star Trek as a child. The show offered a hopeful vision of the future where humanity and technology collaborate, and Diamandis says it motivated him to go out and create that future.
He finds that current sci-fi movies and TV shows are largely fixated on calamity, painting dystopian visions where everything goes wrong because of technology. He cites examples like killer robots and dystopian artificial intelligence in shows like Black Mirror and films like Terminator. His question is simple: why would anyone want to live in that future?
To change this narrative, he called on friends including Rod Roddenberry, son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, investor Cathie Wood, and contacts at Google. They all agreed to sponsor the new Future Vision Xprize. It is a contest designed 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 that positive future, we will be inspired to build it.
He points to the current climate of growing uncertainty in people’s lives, where the speed of change makes it hard to envision a positive future, especially when bombarded with negative stories. Yet he also states that it has never been easier for anyone with an idea to pursue it, referring to the powerful and freely available consumer AI models from companies like Google and OpenAI. This democratizes and demonetizes the ability for people to solve problems.
He uses the field of longevity as an example, where AI is enabling new understanding of the human body’s forty trillion cells. Diamandis wants to see more of this kind of positive, technology-enabled future portrayed on screen.
Interestingly, while he encourages contestants to use AI tools for their projects, Diamandis warns that fully AI-written and produced submissions, which he calls AI slop, probably will not win. He emphasizes that the humanity of the storytelling is critically important.
The Future Vision 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 9 and close on August 15, with winners announced on September 25. 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 will be selected from those short films, receiving 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 to help raise an additional five to ten million dollars for its production budget.
Additional donors include members of Diamandis’s Abundance community of CEOs, along with 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, where people feel the future is not happening to them, but for them.