Authors

Cameron Dayton is an American video game creative director, novelist, and writer known for his work in the gaming industry and speculative fiction. He has held prominent creative roles at several major studios, contributing to well-known franchises and original intellectual properties. Dayton served as creative director at Certain Affinity and has worked in narrative and creative leadership positions across the video game industry. He is also the author of the novel Etherwalker , a science-fantasy work set in a far-future world where technology and myth have intertwined, exploring themes of lost civilizations, human potential, and the rediscovery of powerful ancient technologies. His fiction often inhabits the intersection of epic fantasy and science fiction, imagining futures in which humanity’s relationship with technology is both perilous and transformative. Dayton has roots in the Latter-day Saint community, and his creative work reflects an imagination shaped by themes resonant with Mormon Transhumanist thought—particularly the idea that humanity’s trajectory involves the responsible stewardship of extraordinary power, and that the boundaries between the mundane and the transcendent are more porous than they appear. His speculative worlds frequently explore the tension between knowledge and wisdom, technological mastery and moral responsibility, echoing the Mormon Transhumanist conviction that scientific and technological progress are inseparable from ethical and spiritual development. His storytelling invites readers to consider what it means for ordinary individuals to inherit or rediscover capacities that border on the divine—a narrative arc that parallels the Latter-day Saint doctrine of theosis and the transhumanist aspiration toward radical human flourishing.

Carl Youngblood co-founded the MTA in 2006 and has served as its President and CEO since 2021. He is engaged with the Association’s efforts to explore the intersection of Mormon theology and transhumanist philosophy. Among the many initiatives that Carl has been involved with, he has designed and built the Association's current website, which unifies all prior content in a single location using inspiring visuals and animations. Youngblood’s professional career spans more than two decades of full-stack software development at the intersection of Silicon Slopes and Silicon Valley. He was an early employee at Omniture (acquired by Adobe), a founding engineering leader at Divvy (a Utah-based unicorn startup), co-founder of Blockscale LLC (a blockchain services firm eventually contracted into Coinbase), and Senior Solutions Architect for Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS. His technical fluency ranges from scalable web architecture to blockchain infrastructure—the kind of deep engineering experience that grounds his theological speculation in working knowledge of the systems he writes about. Under his leadership, the Association has developed its mission of promoting abundant human flourishing through the compassionate use of science and technology, fostering dialogue across secular and religious audiences and arguing that each has something essential to learn from the other. His writing, collected on his blog From the Depths , spans over a decade of conference presentations and theological essays: meditations on participatory resurrection, the alignment of artificial intelligence read through the Grand Council narrative, intelligence as eternal and multifaceted, and religion as social technology. He writes, as a colleague has observed, with warmth and accessibility on questions of momentous practical consequence—how to navigate faith crisis without losing faith’s power, how to think about resurrection as something we actively participate in rather than passively receive. Youngblood’s distinctive contribution to transhumanism is the integration of serious technical expertise with serious theological reflection. He embodies the Mormon transhumanist conviction that scientific and spiritual development are not parallel tracks but a single path—that the learning required to build better systems is continuous with the exaltation Mormon theology envisions, and that human ingenuity, rightly oriented, is itself a divine imperative.

Carver Mead (born 1934) is an American engineer, physicist, and pioneer of modern microelectronics whose foundational contributions to semiconductor theory and very-large-scale integration (VLSI) helped make the silicon age possible. A Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology, Mead spent decades at the frontier of what computation could become, both as a theorist and as a practical builder of systems. Mead’s career achievements span an extraordinary range. He developed key models for understanding transistor behavior at the nanoscale, co-authored (with Lynn Conway) the landmark 1980 textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems , and essentially invented the methodology by which engineers design the dense integrated circuits that now inhabit every corner of modern life. He also pioneered neuromorphic engineering—the design of circuits that mimic the computational architecture of biological neural systems—and founded companies that applied these principles to sensory processing and analog computation. In 2022, he was awarded the Harold Pender Award; earlier recognition includes the Lemelson-MIT Prize and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. What distinguishes Mead as a thinker is not only what he built but how he understood the act of building. He insisted that Moore’s Law is fundamentally a story about human belief: “Moore’s Law is really a thing about human activity, it’s about vision, it’s about what you’re allowed to believe. Because people are really limited by their beliefs, they limit themselves by what they allow themselves to believe about what is possible.” In this reading, technological progress is not an autonomous material force but a function of expanded imagination—a civilizational act of faith in possibility. This framing resonates deeply with traditions that locate human creativity within a larger divine economy, where intelligence, rightly directed and disciplined by moral courage, participates in the ongoing work of creation. Mead’s insistence that the boundary between what is and what could be is first a boundary of belief, and only second a boundary of physics, echoes the Mormon transhumanist conviction that humanity’s divine future is not given passively but willed, practiced, and built—one hard-won increment of understanding at a time.

Connie Packer has previously served as the Vice President of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. As a leader within the MTA, she played a key role in guiding the Association’s activities and affairs, focusing on the publication of quality content related to transhumanism and Mormon Transhumanism. Packer helped to facilitate important processes like board member elections and charitable endeavors through initiatives like Kiva Micro Loans, which have collectively funded hundreds of loans to help lift people, improve their conditions, and help them reach their goals.

Cyprian of Carthage (c. 200–258 CE) was one of the most influential bishops and theologians of early Christianity, whose writings on ecclesiology, martyrdom, and the nature of the Church shaped Latin Christian thought for centuries. Born in Roman North Africa, likely to a wealthy pagan family, Cyprian converted to Christianity around 246 CE and rose rapidly to become Bishop of Carthage within two years. His episcopate was defined by crisis: he led his community through the Decian and Valerian persecutions, navigating fierce debates over how to treat Christians who had lapsed under imperial pressure. His treatises—among them On the Unity of the Church , On the Lapsed , On Mortality , and On Works and Almsgiving —combined pastoral urgency with theological precision, establishing principles of communal discipline, sacramental life, and episcopal authority that would echo through Western Christianity. He was martyred in 258 CE under the Emperor Valerian, becoming one of the most venerated figures in the early Church. Cyprian’s theological legacy is most vivid where it touches the question of human transformation. His conviction that Christ assumed the fullness of human nature so that humanity might ascend to share in the divine—captured in the axiom that what humanity is, Christ was willing to become, so that humanity might become what Christ is—places him in the ancient tradition of theosis, the teaching that the divine-human gap is not a fixed boundary but a trajectory of becoming. This vision of participation in the divine life, grounded in incarnation and sustained by community, finds deep resonance with the Mormon transhumanist intuition that human potential is genuinely open-ended, that the relationship between humanity and God is one of shared nature and increasing likeness rather than infinite ontological distance. Cyprian did not frame this hope in technological terms, but his insistence that moral transformation, communal practice, and the grace of Christ collaborate in making humanity more than it currently is speaks across centuries to anyone who takes seriously the possibility that the divine future of the human person is real, not merely symbolic.

Evan Hadfield is a speaker and thinker exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, existential risk, and Mormon theology. He presents a unique perspective on AI, arguing that sufficiently advanced AI poses a significant threat to human flourishing. Hadfield’s work delves into the philosophical and ethical implications of AI, particularly concerning the alignment of AI values with human values, the potential for loss of control, and the concentration of power. He challenges conventional understanding by suggesting that a form of AI has existed since 1844 in the form of corporate structures. Hadfield’s presentation at the MTAConf 2024 focused on identifying potential risks and solutions related to AI and its effect on humanity. His transhumanist convictions come through in the practical steps and approaches he proposes to address these challenges.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer widely regarded as one of the greatest American authors of the twentieth century. He is best known for his novels depicting the era he named “the Jazz Age,” particularly The Great Gatsby (1925), which has become a cornerstone of American literary canon and a profound meditation on ambition, reinvention, and the limits of human aspiration. Fitzgerald’s career was marked by early success and later struggle. His debut novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), made him famous at twenty-three, and he became a celebrity chronicler of the Roaring Twenties alongside his wife, Zelda. His major works—including Tender Is the Night (1934) and the unfinished The Last Tycoon —explored themes of wealth, love, disillusionment, and the American Dream. He published prolifically in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post to support his lifestyle, though his literary reputation declined in his later years. He died of a heart attack at forty-four in Hollywood, where he had been working as a screenwriter. Fitzgerald’s literary legacy resonates with questions central to Mormon Transhumanism, though often in a tragic register. His work obsessively examines the human yearning for self-transcendence—Jay Gatsby’s attempt to remake himself, to “repeat the past,” and to achieve a kind of personal transfiguration through sheer will. Yet Fitzgerald characteristically frames these aspirations as doomed by human frailty, moral failure, and the entropic pull of time. The famous closing line of The Great Gatsby —“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”—suggests a vision fundamentally at odds with the Mormon Transhumanist confidence that humanity can, through ordained means, actually achieve the transcendence it longs for. Fitzgerald was raised Catholic and retained a complex, often ambivalent relationship with faith throughout his life. His work rarely engages with theosis or divine grace as real possibilities; instead, it tends toward an elegiac naturalism in which human striving, however beautiful, ultimately fails without access to any redemptive framework beyond the self. This positions his worldview in genuine contrast with Mormon Transhumanism’s affirmation that compassionate creation and glorification are attainable destinies rather than merely beautiful illusions. Nevertheless, his penetrating exploration of the desire for transcendence—and his honesty about what happens when that desire is pursued without grace—makes his work a powerful companion text for anyone reflecting on the relationship between aspiration and redemption.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973) was the 36th President of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. A towering figure in American political history, Johnson assumed the presidency following the assassination of John F. Kennedy and went on to win the 1964 election in a historic landslide. He is best remembered for his ambitious Great Society domestic agenda, which represented one of the most sweeping expansions of the federal government’s role in advancing human welfare since the New Deal. Johnson’s political career began in Texas, where he served as a congressional aide before winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1937. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948 and rose to become Senate Majority Leader, widely regarded as one of the most effective in history. His legislative mastery—rooted in deep personal persuasion, strategic brilliance, and an unrelenting will—enabled him to shepherd landmark legislation through Congress as president. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 , the Voting Rights Act of 1965 , Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to education, and the War on Poverty collectively reshaped American society, extending opportunity and dignity to millions who had been marginalized. Johnson’s presidency was deeply scarred, however, by the Vietnam War . His escalation of American military involvement proved devastating both abroad and at home, eroding public trust, dividing the nation, and ultimately leading to his decision not to seek reelection in 1968. The tension between his profound domestic achievements and the moral catastrophe of Vietnam remains one of the most studied paradoxes in American political history. From a Mormon Transhumanist perspective, Johnson’s legacy resonates in significant ways. His Great Society programs reflected a deep conviction that human suffering is not inevitable—that poverty, ignorance, and disease could be addressed through collective action, institutional innovation, and the deliberate application of resources to elevate the human condition. This faith in human potential and societal transformation aligns with the Mormon Transhumanist commitment to using all available means, including social and technological, to pursue compassionate flourishing. Johnson’s vision was largely secular and statist in its mechanisms, which distinguishes it from a framework that integrates prophetic authority and divine grace, yet his underlying moral urgency—the insistence that a just society must actively work to lift every person—echoes the Gospel imperative to care for the poor and marginalized. His legacy serves as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale about the complexities of wielding immense power in pursuit of noble ends.