Retrospective at Year's End
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.
Dear Friends and Fellow Supporters of the Mormon Transhumanist Association,
Merry Christmas from the MTA
I look back in awe at the dramatic changes that we have witnessed in the past year. There has been rapid progress in the field of artificial intelligence, both in improved performance on existing benchmarks and in the application of AI to new domains of creativity and scientific research. The ARC AGI tests, which were created in 2019 to test AI on problems that require abstract reasoning and are easy for humans but difficult for large language models, began the year with the best publicly-available LLMs hardly passing a single test. Earlier this month, OpenAI announced that their new high-compute o3 model has passed 87.5% of the 1,000 tasks in the entire ARC-AGI corpus.
Even the baseline AI tools that are now freely available to the public are exceptional in their ability to educate and assist humanity, irrespective of nationality, gender, color or creed. AI is also being applied to a host of challenging problems in important fields like energy, material science, medicine, robotics, and even more exotic areas of research, like deciphering the languages of plants and animals.
The high computation requirements of artificial intelligence have fueled the demand for more energy and more efficient forms of energy generation. Renewable energy is rapidly being deployed, and regulations are being reformed to facilitate next-generation nuclear energy as well. We have also witnessed remarkable progress in areas such as gene therapies, personalized medicine, and vaccine research, as well as quantum computing.
Despite these advances, we continue to face the impacts of climate change and habitat deterioration; increasing disparity in wealth and access to healthcare; threats of new global pandemics; not to mention political instability and mass displacement of peoples devastated by war.
While these threats remain daunting, they are not insurmountable. Our calling as religious transhumanists is to face the future with hope in the possibility of progress and awareness of our essential role in achieving it. We are confident that God will aid but will not do for us what we are capable of doing ourselves; indeed, that learning how to achieve peaceful geopolitics and wise stewardship of the natural world are essential to fulfilling our destiny as children of God.
“In the fullness of time” is an expression often used to foreshadow the culmination or resolution of a long process of evolution or progress. As I consider this expression, I am reminded of latter-day revelation calling our position in human history “the dispensation of the fullness of times” (D&C 128:20). My conviction that we live in that fateful dispensation is stronger than ever. I rejoice in the privilege of working alongside you all in this great cause, and I look forward to exciting opportunities to share our message with a broader audience in the coming year. I invite you to contribute and get involved in your local chapter, online and in person.
I hope and pray for peace and prosperity for you and your loved ones during this holiday season and throughout the coming year. May the love of Christ abide in our hearts and homes, and extend throughout the world.
With gratitude,
Carl Youngblood
President & CEO