World building contest
The Future of Life Institute is welcoming entries from teams across the globe, to compete for a prize purse of up to $100,000 by designing visions of a plausible, aspirational future that includes strong artificial intelligence.
© barrow-motion
What Is World
Building?
Worldbuilding exercises generally start with some “ground rules” to provide focus. The “ground rules” are illustrated below.
Worldbuilding is the art and science of constructing a coherent and detailed fictitious world. It is frequently practiced by creative writers and scriptwriters, providing the context and backdrop for stories that take place in future, fantasy or alternative realities. Submissions will use the tools of worldbuilding to explore possible futures for our own world. They will help us better understand what sorts of worlds may be more or less desirable, and potentially how to get to a more desirable reality. Worldbuilding is not prediction: the worlds built here should be believable and internally consistent. That said, builds of future worlds are still speculative and need not target the most probable scenarios.
Your Mission
Your job, working individually or as a small team, is to design a plausible and aspirational world consistent with a set of ground rules, outlined in the video above.
Plausible means that the world should be one that could well happen. In particular it should be:
- Consistent with today’s actual world;
- Consistent with known science;
- Not rely on any implausible “miracles” to make sense (though improbable events occur in any realistic world!)
Aspirational means that, while not utopian, this world is one that you and presumably many others would like to inhabit. It would be seen as a fairly good outcome and a hopeful vision. Where this is in tension with plausibility, plausibility should win – that is, being hopeful does not mean being naive, and just as your world should not rely on implausible “miracles” to make it self-consistent, it should not rely on them to be desirable.
How to enter
Submissions will consist of four elements. They should at some level tie together into a coherent picture, with e.g. the “day in the life” pieces illustrating some of the institutions, technologies, or social structures explained in your answers to the questions.
Timeline of events from 2022-2045
"A Day in the Life" Short Stories
Answers to prompts about your world
Original non-text media piece
Prizes
Submissions close April 15th. Twenty teams will be selected and announced as finalists by May 15th.
The general public will be invited to give feedback on these final 20 entries, largely on their aspirational quality. Incorporating this feedback, the panel of judges will rank the entries and award the following prizes:
First prize: $20,000
Two second prizes: $10,000 each
Five third prizes: $2,000 each
Ten fourth prizes: $1,000 each
Judges discretionary prizes: up to five prizes of up to $2,000 each.
Important note: Prizes will be evenly split among members of prizewinning teams, but to encourage collaboration they will also be up-scaled by a factor of 1.5 for 2-person teams, 1.75 for 3-person teams, 1.875 for 4-person teams, and 2.0 for 5-person or more teams. Thus, e.g., a two-person team winning first prize would be awarded $15,000 each. This means that the contest has a total prize pool of up to $140,000.
Looking For Teammates?
Attend our next workshop (info coming soon)