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What Does It Mean to Be Post-Human? Terraform & AMC Want Your Speculations

Terraform and AMC are partnering up to take a speculative dive into our incipient age of Artificial Intelligence.

What does it mean to be human? Science fiction has explored this question since its inception. Androids, robots, aliens, and artificial intelligences shade through our favorite stories and novels, confronting us, forcing us to determine—on ever more complex gradients of gray—where the human ends and something else begins. Such stories were once thought experiments, but as we approach functional artificial intelligence in a world increasingly populated by lifelike agents, the need to pose real and difficult questions becomes more pressing.

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Terraform and AMC are partnering up to take a speculative dive into our incipient age of Artificial Intelligence. How soon will AI walk, run, text, or tweet among us? What will it look like—a chrome humanoid robot, as the annals of sci-fi would have it? Or, perhaps more likely, like disembodied lines of code in an algorithm designed to sell us fast food?

HUMANS, AMC's new miniseries about a world where highly-developed robotic servants are commonplace, promises to tackle these issues. And now, so will we. We're running a contest that aims to examine the possibilities of a post-human world through something that has always separated the human mind from its would-be copycats: fiction.

We're looking for stories about the post-human world. Stories that explore where we end and something else begins. Stories which take place in one of three timelines: The present, 50 years from now, and 100 years from now.

Human + Tomorrow

Human + 50 years

Human + 100 years

Set your story in one of those temporal zones, and submit to Terraform with POST-HUMAN contest in the subject line. The co-editors of Terraform (MOTHERBOARD's Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans of YACHT) will select three winners, one for each temporal zone, and one grand prize winner. Stories must be 2,000 words or less, and the deadline is July 16th.

PRIZES

-Each (of three) category winner will win $1,000 and have their work published on Terraform with original artwork.

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-The grand prize winning story gets $2,000

-Winning story turned into an interactive graphic digital short / special edition graphic novelization by Terraform artists

-Print of artwork


For full contest details, eligibility information, and official rules, please click here.