As any “Star Trek” fan will tell you, the reason this sci-fi world has endured so long is because it depicts an optimistic future, with technology starring as a force for good.
In fact, renowned Xprize founder, author, tech investor, speaker, and longevity guru Peter Diamandis just released a new $3.5 million. Future Vision Xprize to encourage more such optimistic sci-fi worlds to come to our screens.
He credits his entire great career to watching “Star Trek” growing up.
“‘Star Trek’ offered a hopeful vision of the future, right? It was humans/humanity and technology working together,” Diamandis told TechCrunch. “I really credit that with everything I’ve accomplished since then, because they motivated me to want to go and create and manifest that future.”
He finds that sci-fi movies and TV shows these days are largely focused on disaster.
“Every sci-fi movie I saw painted this dystopian vision of the future. Always, everything goes wrong, and it’s a result of technology. You know, killer robots, dystopian AI. It’s ‘Black Mirror.’ It’s ‘Terminator.’ It’s ‘Ex Machina,'” he said. “Why would you ever want to live in that future?”
So he invited his friends Rod Roddenberry, son of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, Salesforce billionaire CEO Marc Benioff, famous Ark investor and CEO Cathie Wood, and his friends at Google. All have agreed to sponsor the new Future Vision Xprize.
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It’s a competition that encourages filmmakers to tell more stories about how good things can be in a technological future. Diamantis believes that if we see this we will fix it.
“Right now, there’s a huge growing uncertainty in people’s lives. Will my kids have a job? Will I have a job?” he said. The speed of change makes it difficult for people to envision their future, especially when they are swayed by “negative stories about tomorrow.”
There is another truth, says Diamantis. As a person who stands on the corner of artificial intelligence and longevity, he knows that it has never been easier for anyone with an idea to follow it.
“The most powerful tools on the planet are free and available to everyone,” he said, referring to consumer AI models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. “I mean, that’s honestly incredible, right? … We’ve democratized and monetized people’s ability to solve problems.”
Take longevity, for example, the study of living longer and healthier as we age.
“Artificial intelligence enables us to understand what is happening in our 40 trillion human cells,” he said. (Diamandis, along with Tony Robbins, co-founded the longevity health technology Fountain Life.) He wants to see more of this kind of future on screen.
Interestingly, while he encourages contestants to use AI tools for their projects, Diamandis cautions that AI — submissions entirely written and constructed by AI — likely won’t win.
“I don’t want an AI-generated script and an AI-generated movie without the human,” he advises. “Everyone’s humanity is very important.”
In fact, the Future Vision Xprize is run with his help 100 Zeros Initiative. It is a collaboration between Google and production company Range Media Partners. It works with filmmakers to produce technology-inspired stories using Google tools. (Google has a video production model called Veo, for example, and a video creation tool called Flow.)
Submissions open March 9th, close August 15th, with winners announced September 25th. Each candidate will submit a three-minute trailer. Diamandis expects to “flood” YouTube with these submissions, allowing anyone to view and comment. Judges, led by the Range Media team, will narrow these submissions down to a handful who will receive funding to produce a 10-minute short.
The grand prize winner will be selected from among the short films, receiving $2.5 million in production funding to develop a feature film and a $100,000 cash prize. The winning project is also expected to be shown in the film section of the crowdfunding site Republic, to help it raise an additional $5 million to $10 million for its production budget.
Diamantis says members of the Abundance CEO community he mentors have also opened their wallets. About 15 of them have contributed nearly half the prize money, he said.
In addition, other key donors include Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb and actor-producer Seth Green.
Diamantis hopes for a repeat competition. He wants to turn horror into what he calls an “exponential mindset.” That means “having agency, where you feel like the future isn’t happening to you, that the future is happening for you,” he said.
