Videos

A musical performance of “Somewhere” from West Side Story, expressing the transhumanist hope for “a place for grace” and “a time and place for us.” The song’s themes of finding a new way of living, forgiving, and holding hands toward a better future resonate with the conference’s exploration of human flourishing and transcendence.

Several MTA officers share brief personal reflections on their experiences with the Mormon Transhumanist Association. Connie Packer describes finding encouragement to develop and share her thoughts in a community of respectful intellectual debate. Second-generation members Dallin Bradford and Spencer Cannon reflect on growing up with transhumanist ideals, describing how the MTA provides a nuanced lens for integrating faith and science. Joseph West speaks of how the association enabled him to live authentically within Mormon principles, transforming his religion into a resource rather than a source of conflict. The speakers emphasize themes of creation, compassion, and courage as essential qualities for building a better future.

Tamara Kneese explores the ethical and environmental costs of using AI to maintain digital representations of deceased loved ones. Drawing from her book “Death Glitch,” she examines how data centers, generative AI, and digital afterlife projects consume massive amounts of energy and water while creating new questions about consent, data governance, and inheritance. Kneese critiques long-termist fantasies of digital immortality and questions whether directing resources toward preserving the dead online represents a sustainable investment in our collective future.

Adam Scott’s arrangement of the classic Latter-day Saint hymn “The Morning Breaks” is performed at a Mormon Transhumanist Association conference. The performance reinterprets Parley P. Pratt’s text about Zion’s banner unfurling and truth’s rays dispersing shadows, themes that resonate with the transhumanist hope of a brighter future dawning through human effort and divine cooperation.

The speaker examines four major ideological positions on AI—denialism, optimism, safetyism, and accelerationism—and finds each wanting. Denialism ignores mounting evidence that artificial general intelligence is achievable. Optimism fails to recognize that AGI, unlike other technologies, cannot be controlled because it can act autonomously beyond human strategic capabilities. Safetyism’s endgame—a “singleton” AI that controls the world to prevent unsafe AI—is both totalitarian and likely impossible given fundamental limits on proof systems. Accelerationism, while sophisticated in its arguments about thermodynamic gradients and evolutionary progress, asks humans to surrender their agency for abstract narratives beyond their control. The speaker’s conclusion: what we fear about AI is that it will embody the dangerous, open-ended agency we have denied ourselves. Rather than worshipping or fearing AI, we should focus on developing our own moral agency and “make ourselves human again.”

Ally Isom argues that authentic human connection is the antidote to our era’s epidemic loneliness, political polarization, and declining mental health. Drawing on neuroscience and social science research, she demonstrates that connection strengthens immune systems, lengthens lives, and builds resilience after trauma. While raising important questions about privacy, surveillance advertising, and misinformation in digital spaces, Isom concludes with a story of two boys—one Ukrainian, one Russian—playing video games together despite the war that made one homeless and the other fatherless, finding hope in their simple connection.

Ben Blair, co-founder of New Lane University, argues that traditional higher education holds students in a “stranglehold” through control of cost, scheduling, geography, and student records. He proposes a decentralized model where educational pathways—built from discrete learning objectives—can be created, improved, and verified by experts worldwide without requiring institutional intermediaries. Blair describes how New Lane offers college degrees for $1,500 using open-source resources, self-assessment, and oral examinations conducted via video conference. He envisions a future where curriculum continuously improves through expert competition, instruction is optimized at the learning-objective level, and students own their own educational records.

Bernardo Vicente presents Harbergeorgism, an economic theory combining Henry George’s land value tax with Harberger taxation’s self-assessed asset pricing. Vicente argues that Web3 technologies—including city coins, DAOs, and blockchain-based property systems—create opportunities to implement these long-theorized economic mechanisms. The framework envisions decentralized city governance where land ownership generates community revenue through land value taxes, while Harberger taxes on businesses encourage efficient asset allocation by requiring owners to sell at their declared valuations. Vicente contends that crypto cities and metaverse environments should develop new economic models rather than replicate legacy systems.

Carl Youngblood opens the 2022 MTA Conference on “Decentralization of Power” with a comprehensive introduction to Web3 technologies and their implications for governance. He traces the evolution from Web 1.0’s server-based content to Web 2.0’s social platforms to the emerging decentralized Web3 ecosystem built on blockchain. Youngblood explains how cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DeFi, and DAOs are enabling new forms of transparent, democratic governance that may eventually give rise to “digital nations.” He connects these technological developments to Mormon utopian visions, suggesting that DAOs and charter cities represent modern approaches to building better communities.

Evan McMullin brings a unique perspective to Web3 regulation, drawing on his experience as a former CIA officer who ran counterterrorism operations overseas, senior advisor to Congress, and U.S. Senate candidate. A BYU graduate with an MBA from Wharton and former mission service in Brazil, McMullin argues for regulatory clarity to maintain American leadership in emerging blockchain and decentralized technologies while balancing innovation with security concerns.