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MTAConf 2024 Archives Now Available

2024.04.13
Carl Youngblood
Carl Youngblood

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.

MTAConf 2024: The Glory of God Is Intelligence, explored cutting-edge developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning through the unique lens of Mormon theology. Held on April 13th in Provo, Utah, the day-long event featured keynote speeches from renowned experts Benjamin Peters and Irina Rish alongside presentations by members and invited guests. Topics spanned the technological frontiers of AI like large language models, computer vision, and neural networks, as well as the profound philosophical and spiritual implications for consciousness, agency, creativity, and human flourishing. Presenters grappled with heady questions around the nature of intelligence, ethics and existential risk, value alignment, the simulation hypothesis, theosis and human exaltation in relation to superintelligence. Throughout, Mormon transhumanist perspectives offered unique theological insights into how embracing science and technological progress can be a deeply religious, even sacred pursuit.

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View the archives here.