Videos

Michaelann Bradley offers a transhumanist meditation on Christianity’s two central symbols: the cross and the communion bread. She contrasts the 30,000-year history of bread-making—a cumulative technological miracle of fire, agriculture, and fermentation passed down through generations—with humanity’s equally inventive history of torture and judicial killing. Rather than finding cosmic meaning in the extremity of Christ’s suffering, Bradley locates redemption in the simpler act of communion: the sharing of sustenance made possible by ancestral ingenuity. For transhumanists creating vitamin pills, coding platforms, or virtual reality, this reframing suggests that small technological contributions to human flourishing are themselves sacramental acts of rebellion against the cross. The presentation concludes with a congregational hymn sung to the tune of “If You Could Hie to Kolob.”

Michelle Glauser shares her journey from growing up in a large Mormon family in Salt Lake City to becoming an advocate for diversity in technology. Starting as a self-described nerd in computer club who experimented with Visual Basic and HTML without realizing these skills could become a career, she discusses how her unconventional path into tech informs her work empowering underrepresented groups to find their place in the technology industry.

Robin Hanson, economist and futurist, explores what happens when brain emulations—digital copies of human minds—become economically viable. Drawing on standard economic theory, he predicts that “ems” would live in vast virtual cities, work at subsistence wages due to easy copying, and experience time at speeds up to a thousand times faster than humans. Hanson argues this scenario could trigger the next major economic transition, with the economy potentially doubling every month. He examines how ems would form “clans” of copies, adopt farmer-era religious attitudes, and create a class hierarchy based on processing speed—while retired humans live off rapidly growing capital investments.

Steven Peck challenges the deterministic “block universe” of Laplace’s demon, arguing that genuine randomness—rooted in quantum events—bubbles up through biology to create an open, evolving cosmos. Drawing on chaos theory, emergence, and evolutionary biology, he contends that novelty is continuously generated in ways that were never predetermined at the Big Bang. For Peck, this openness has profound theological implications: if God has an embodied, biological nature, then faith, hope, and charity are not merely earthly virtues but eternal necessities for navigating a universe where the future remains genuinely unwritten.

Ben Blair argues that strong communities are byproducts of pursuing worthy aims rather than ends in themselves. He critiques both religious institutions that equate themselves with the kingdom of God and secular groups that make community their primary goal, suggesting that both miss the driving force of shared purpose. Drawing on examples from the D-Day invasion to the Mormon pioneers, Blair proposes that the Mormon Transhumanist Association’s aspirational vision—working collaboratively toward becoming gods who lift each other up—provides the kind of “work cut out for us” that sustains robust, long-lasting communities.

Blaire Ostler shares her personal journey from faith crisis to renewed belief, exploring what it means to be made in the image of God from a feminist and transhumanist perspective. She recounts how the male-centric imagery of traditional Mormon theology led her to functional atheism, before finding a more expansive vision of God that embraces intersectional diversity—male and female, black and white, all bodies. Connecting Joseph Smith’s teachings on theosis with the New God Argument, Ostler argues that if humanity evolves toward godhood, that divine future must reflect the full diversity of human experience, declaring that “God is as intersectionally diverse as ourselves.”

Caleb Jones examines how semiotics—the study of signs and symbols—can transform our understanding of religious faith and revelation. Through the scriptural phrase “Unto what shall I liken?” he explores how revelation inherently involves encoding divine experience into limited human symbols, a process that breaks down between communicator and audience. Jones argues that this semiotic awareness invites self-reflection about religious symbols: rather than treating doctrine as fixed edicts, we can approach them as milestones in an evolving faith, recognizing that prophets speak through the “poor symbols our life affords” while disciples maintain responsibility to discern through charity and Christ-centered filters.

Carl Youngblood examines the crisis of faith in Mormonism’s post-secular era, where widespread access to information has made it difficult for the LDS Church to control its narrative. Drawing on Paul Tillich’s theology, he critiques common responses—apologetics, appeals to authority, fundamentalism, and secularism—as inadequate because they either mistake finite constructs for ultimate concern or abandon the symbols that give faith its vitality. Youngblood quotes B. H. Roberts’s call for “disciples of the second sort” who bring personal contributions to received truth rather than merely repeating formulas, and he positions the Mormon Transhumanist Association as cultivating such disciples.

Chris Bradford responds to Richard Bushman’s question about grace in transhumanism by proposing that divine grace is best understood as “givenness”—everything God has given us, in whom we “live, move, and have our being.” Drawing on Russian cosmist Nikolai Fedorov and Mormon scripture, he argues that God needs humanity to complete the divine work begun in creation. Bradford contends that all matter is infused with divinity, blurring the line between divine and human action, and that the transhumanist project—if infused with the spirit of Christ—can build a temple rather than another Tower of Babel.

Eric Steinhart presents a philosophical framework for “eternal progression” rooted in evolutionary and computational metaphysics. He argues that all complex things emerge from simpler predecessors through “cosmological cranes,” positing an endless hierarchy of beings—he calls them “Titans”—that reproduce, grow in complexity, and eventually design universes much as organisms build shells or nests. Steinhart suggests that transhumanist visions of expanding into planetary-scale computers and running ancestor simulations may describe our future lives in upgraded universes, with divine couples collaboratively designing worlds through something akin to “celestial marriage.”