MTA Essay on AI featured in Wayfare Magazine
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.
Wayfare Magazine’s latest online issue features contributions from various LDS thinkers on artificial intelligence, including an essay by MTA President Carl Youngblood, “Algorithmic Advent.” Carl explores the existential risks humanity faces during the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and shares several relevant insights from Mormon theology. In addition to this groundbreaking article, Carl recently participated in a panel discussion at Writ and Vision bookstore that was also transcribed for Wayfare. Be sure to check out the posts and add your comments to the discussion.
A Mind Forever Voyaging, in the style of Paul Klee
As our godlike powers increase, what types of gods will we become? Selfish gods who lord their power over others, or compassionate creators transfigured in the image of Christ? (Carl Youngblood)
AI in the News
AI has been a hotly debated topic in the news lately, including among religious thinkers. The editors of Commonweal Magazine expressed support for Eliezer Yudkowski’s recent call for a moratorium on AI research championed by several industry insiders, voicing concerns in other articles over the proliferation of mediocre AI-generated content and how humans may increasingly become the servants, rather than the masters, of technology. Writing for Plough, Jeffrey Bilbro worries that over-reliance on AI may be a Faustian bargain that will cause human abilities to atrophy. Jessica Mesman, associate editor at The Christian Century, fears that because AI is trained on human behavior, “it will tend to replicate our worst flaws.”
AI is a product of human ingenuity; thus, any AI necessarily carries with it some of the humanity that underpins creativity. (Walter Scheirer, Comment)
A more positive perspective was shared in Comment by Walter Scheirer, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame, who encouraged people to avoid sensationalism around the topic of AI by “being generous with our time to help others understand the positive uses of newly emerging technology.”
Transhumanist-adjacent secular publications also had interesting things to say. Noema Magazine explores the limitations in current generative AI services, and worries that fear about AGI takeover may be distracting people from more urgent near-term risks posed by the current state of the art. Palladium argues that “AGI is both possible and deadly,” although it cautions that the present AI investment cycle may be overhyped.
On personal blogs, two posts that we found especially insightful came from Peter Lewis and Venkatesh Rao. In “Of Fish and Robots,” Lewis points out the difficulty of assessing sentience, along with the flaws in using it as the primary determinant of whether a given behavior is ethical or not, claiming that how we treat AI and other borderline sentience says a lot more about us than about the thing being treated. In “Text is All You Need,” Rao observes that the most distressing aspect of ChatGPT’s arrival seems to be how effortlessly it mimics human-like behavior, resulting in either a trivialization of the human or an exaltation of the technological, both of which dramatically narrow what was once a wider gulf.
From the Archives
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co3hlIymhNU
In “Open Thou Mine Eyes,” presented at our 2018 annual conference, Chris Bradford calls our attention to the danger of “a purely technological approach to the world,” where the increasing technical abstractions around human activity can cause us to become isolated from other people, or worse, objectify others rather than recognize their agency and inherent dignity. Bradford explains how a religious perspective on transhumanism can provide an important counterbalance to these tendencies. This message seems especially relevant to current concerns surrounding artificial intelligence.
Back in the Day: The Original AI Doomer
The original AI doomer
We recently discovered a delightful source of humorous historical anecdotes reminding us that prophecies of technological apocalypse are not new. The Pessimists’ Archive, whose logo is a half-empty glass, is an entertaining foray into the fear and loathing of our forebears. This article revives the prognostications of Dr. Norbert Wiener made in 1959, whose jeremiads seem remarkably similar to those of Eliezer Yudkowski, the author of the recent op-ed in Time calling for a moratorium on AI research. Dr. Wiener’s warnings cite the predictions of an even earlier figure, Samuel Butler, made in 1863, while claiming that although Butler’s warnings did not come to pass, things would be different this time (in 1959) because of how much faster machines had become. We found this blog to be both amusing and helpful for gaining needed perspective on technological advances.
The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth. (D&C 93:36)