Billionaire founding father of XPRIZE Peter Diamandis is bored with the doomsday eventualities painted by films like Terminator or Ex Machina.
The engineer and Harvard-trained doctor-turned-entrepreneur is making an attempt to alter the narrative with a brand new $3.5 million Future Imaginative and prescient XPRIZE. Backed by Google and expertise company Vary Media Companions’ 100 ZEROS initiative, the fund will promote “optimistic sci-fi,” providing a novel take a look at an usually dystopian-geared subgenre of science fiction films.
Aspiring filmmakers can submit three-minute trailers or quick movies that painting “positive visions of the future,” for the prospect to be considered one of 5 finalists to obtain $100,000 in money. The winner will obtain each the money prize in addition to $2.5 million to make their concept right into a full-length movie. That is mixed with the $500,000 complete given to the finalists plus $500,000 extra in further prizes not but revealed to make up the $3.5 million prize.
The finalists will current their movies at Diamandis’ Moonshot Gathering, a brand new convention he’s launching in September aimed toward youthful entrepreneurs. Diamandis, who based the XPRIZE Basis to steer design and operations of large-scale incentive competitions, stated he expects the ultimate prize to extend as further backers come on board.
The brand new XPRIZE comes as nervousness over the way forward for AI is mounting. Layoffs tied to AI instruments elevated final month after Block laid off 4,000 staff, with CEO Jack Dorsey citing the capabilities of “intelligence tools.” Excessive-profile enterprise leaders similar to Jamie Dimon and Microsoft’s AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman have additionally warned in opposition to AI’s potential to interchange white collar employees and put folks out of labor. In the meantime, one of many greatest AI gamers, Anthropic, stated in a report final week that not simply entry-level staff, but additionally older, extra educated employees could possibly be in danger for displacement.
In opposition to that backdrop, Diamandis stated the brand new XPRIZE is extra wanted than ever. As know-how and folks’s worry about it each develop, there must be a extra constructive instance of what the long run may appear like, he argued.
“I challenge you to talk about one positive movie about technology—and if that’s the only image you have of the future, why would you want to live there?” Diamandis instructed Fortune.
Diamandis pointed to the present Star Trek because the sort of sci-fi he desires to foster—a present that portrayed collaboration between people and know-how fairly than battle. When he was creating the prize, he reached out to Rod Roddenberry, founding father of The Roddenberry Basis, whose father Gene Roddenberry created the present, and obtained him to help the thought. Cathie Wooden, the CEO of asset administration agency ARK Make investments, has additionally signed on as a sponsor.
For greater than 30 years, Diamandis and the XPRIZE Basis have pushed for analysis and growth in every little thing from area journey to rising people’ well being span in what has now culminated in 30 prizes and greater than $600 million in prize purses.
This latest XPRIZE was a pure extension of the muse’s work, Diamandis stated, and but, whereas the prize is selling know-how, the movies submitted for the prize should be human, not AI-driven.
“We’re not looking for an AI to write a script and an AI to make a film without a human in the loop,” he stated. “This needs to be driven by someone who has got an impassioned vision of what a future worth living into can look like.”
