Billionaire Peter Diamandis offers $3.5 million to filmmakers who portray AI as the hero—not the villain

Billionaire founder of XPRIZE Peter Diamandis is tired of the doomsday scenarios painted by movies like Terminator or Ex Machina.

The engineer and Harvard-trained doctor turned entrepreneur is trying to change the narrative with a new $3.5 million Future Vision XPRIZE. Backed by Google and talent agency Range Media Partners’ 100 Zeros initiative, the fund will promote “optimistic sci-fi,” offering a novel look at an often dystopian-geared subgenre of science fiction movies. 

Aspiring filmmakers can submit three-minute trailers or short films that portray “positive visions of the future,” for the chance to be one of five finalists to receive $100,000 in cash. The winner will receive both the cash prize as well as $2.5 million to make their idea into a full-length film. This is combined with the $500,000 total given to the finalists plus $500,000 more in additional prizes not yet revealed to make up the $3.5 million prize.

The finalists will present their films at Diamandis’s Moonshot Gathering, a new conference he is launching in September aimed at younger entrepreneurs. Diamandis, who founded the XPRIZE Foundation to lead design and operations of large-scale incentive competitions, said he expects the final prize to increase as additional backers come on board.

The new XPRIZE comes as anxiety over the future of AI is mounting. Layoffs tied to AI too...