Your Utopian Vision of the Future Could Be Worth $10,000

“Dystopic visions of the future are common in literature and film, while optimistic ones are more rare.” So begins the prompt for an essay contest organised by the Foundational Questions Institute, Estonian programmer Jaan Tallinn, the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and Scientific American, which invites you to consider “How Should Humanity Steer the Future?” with a top prize of $10,000.

Now before you send in a postcard that says “Straight into the ground for all I care”—first off, get a cup of coffee and lighten up, buddy—and remember that “While this topic is broad, successful essays will not use this breadth as an excuse to shoehorn in the author's pet topic, but will rather keep as their central focus the theme of how humanity should steer the future.” So hang on to your “Abandon Obamacare Immediately” essay for the Heartland Institute, and begin considering things like "What is the best state that humanity can realistically achieve?" and "What is your plan for getting us there? Who implements this plan?"

You have until April 18 to write your up-to-nine-page manifesto on how good we can possibly have it and the map to get there. This isn’t an invitation to write your own Utopia—and it should perhaps be reminded that the word "utopia" is in fact a portmanteau meaning “nowhere,” which only later came to mean some impossible ideal. The goal of the FQXi essay contest is something more substantiated, something “technically correct and rigorously argued.”

That said, the judges are going to give twice as much weight to the essay being compelling and interesting than to it being relevant, so it’s easy to see, say, Huxley beating out a drier section of Marx, for instance. Although, as noted, you’ve only got nine pages, so don’t feel like you’re in competition with either one. The judging will be done both by a community—everyone who submitted an essay or is an FQXi member—on FQXi’s site as well as by a secret “panel of experts.”

Just so you know what you can expect to be up against, last year’s essay prompt was “It From Bit or Bit From It?” and the top prize was won by a Matthew Leifer, who outlined a derivation of noncontexuality within a generalization of probability theory. Leifer has a PhD in quantum information, and, likely due to the prompt, most of the authors who submitted seemed to be working in physics in some capacity.

But this year’s much broader prompt opens the door for science fiction writers, as well as, would-be science fiction writers, as it isn’t a question that’s easily limited to one field, but rather could be considered “worldbuilding,” something that science fiction author Neal Stephenson argues is “sci-fi’s greatest contribution…showing how new technologies function in a web of social and economic systems,” which is pretty much what this prompt calls for. For what it’s worth, Stephenson also says that science fiction is too pessimistic. There is, of course, also a philosophical angle to the whole question of how to steer humanity, a tradition dating back to Plato’s Republic. Plato's solution was a pretty unattractive sounding city-state run by philosopher kings with only marches and flute music to listen to; still, at least it was an ethos.

Anyway, if you’re reading Motherboard, you’re probably mulling over the future often enough that this should really just roll right off your fingertips.