Xprize founder Peter Diamandis launches new contest to manifest a new ‘Star Trek’  

As any “Star Trek” fan will tell you, the reason why this sci-fi world has endured for so long is because it illustrates an optimistic future, with tech starring as a power for good. 

In fact, famed Xprize founder, author, tech investor, motivational speaker, and longevity guru Peter Diamandis has just launched a new $3.5 million Future Vision Xprize to encourage more such optimistic sci-fi worlds to come to our screens. 

He credits his whole fabulous career to watching “Star Trek” as a child growing up. 

“’Star Trek’ offered a hopeful vision of the future, right? It was humans/humanity and technology in collaboration,” Diamandis told TechCrunch. “I truly credit it with everything that I since achieved, because it 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 fixated on calamity.

“Every science-fiction movie I was seeing painted this dystopian vision of the future. It was always, everything is going wrong, and it’s a result of technology. You know, killer robots, dystopian AIs. 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 called up his friends Rod Roddenberry, son of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, billionaire Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, famed investor and Ark CEO Cathie Wood, and his buddies at Google. They all agreed to sponsor the new Future Vision Xprize.  

It’s a contest to encourage film creators to tell more stories about how good things can be in a technological future. Diamandis believes that if we see that, we will build it.

“Right now, there’s a huge amount of 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 hard for people to envision their futures, especially when clobbered with “negative stories about tomorrow.” 

Another truth exists, too, Diamandis says. As a person standing at the corner of AI and longevity, he knows that it’s never been easier for anyone with an idea to pursue it. 

“The most powerful tools on the planet are free and available to everybody,” he said, referring to consumer AI models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. “I mean, that’s honestly incredible, right? … We have democratized and demonetized the ability for people to solve problems.” 

Take longevity, for instance, the study of living longer as well as healthier as we age.  

“AI is enabling us to understand what’s going on in our 40 trillion human cells,” he said. (Diamandis, along with Tony Robbins, is a co-founder of longevity health tech Fountain Life.) He wants to see more of this kind of future on-screen. 

Interestingly, while he encourages the contestants to use AI tools for their projects, Diamandis warns that AI slop — fully AI-written and produced submissions — probably won’t win.  

“I don’t want an AI generated-script and an AI-generated film without the human,” he advises. “The humanity of it all is really important.”

In fact, the Future Vision Xprize is being conducted with help of the 100 Zeros initiative. That’s a partnership between Google and production company Range Media Partners. It works with filmmakers to produce tech-inspired stories using Google tools. (Google has a video-generation model called Veo, for instance, and a video-creation tool called Flow.) 

Submissions open March 9, close August 15, with winners announced September 25. Each applicant will submit a three-minute trailer. Diamandis expects to “flood” YouTube with these submissions, allowing anyone to view and comment. Judges, led by the team at Range Media, will cull those submissions into a handful that receive funding to produce a 10-minute short.  

The grand prize winner will be selected from the short films, receiving $2.5 million in production funding toward developing a feature film and a $100,000 cash prize. The winning project is also expected to be featured on the film section of crowdsourcing site Republic, to help it raise an additional $5 million to $10 million for its production budget.

Diamandis says that members of his Abundance community of CEOs that 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 Andreessen Horowitz’s Ben Horowitz, Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb, and actor producer Seth Green.

Diamandis hopes that this becomes a repeated contest. He wants to turn dread into what he calls “an exponential mindset.” That means “having agency, where you feel like the future is not happening to you, that the future is happening for you,” he said.