The Future of the MTA

Speaker 1

Chris Bradford was born in Utah, but soon moved to Washington, D. C. , and then overseas for his father’s employment. He lived in Egypt, Germany, Jordan, Pakistan, and Italy, where he served an LDS mission, a self-taught program. He is currently VP of engineering at Ancestry. com. He has a degree from Brigham Young University in Linguistics. Chris and wife Lucy have five sons and three daughters. Chris is passionate about science, technology, religion, philosophy, and the performing arts. Chris is president and co-founder of the Mormon Trans Humanist Association. Chris.

Chris Bradford

Good morning. And there shall be earthquakes in diverse places, and many desolations. Yet men will harden their hearts against me, and they will take up the sword. one against another, and they will kill one another. And thus with the sword and by bloodshed the inhabitants of the earth shall mourn. And with famine and plague and earthquake and the thunder of heaven and the fierce and vivid lightning also shall the inhabitants of the earth Be made to feel the wrath and indignation and chastening hand of an almighty God until the consumption decreed hath made a full end of all nations.

Chris Bradford

Or the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb. And the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed, their young ones shall lie down together. and the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatress’s den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away.

Chris Bradford

What makes the difference between these contrasting visions of the future? I think a lot of that depends on what we collectively do.

Chris Bradford

Last year, the MTA passed its 10-year anniversary. And I wanted to look back a little bit at those 10 years. Not too much to take away from Lincoln’s presentation later on, but touch on a couple of things. In 2006, when the MTA was founded, Transhumanism was not nearly as much in the public consciousness as it is now. You know, some people had heard of it, but It didn’t get a lot of press. We’re starting to see that change. And in particular, back then, religious transhumanism was often considered ridiculous or even inconceivable. I think that has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. And I think the MTA has a lot to do with that. We have really spent quite a bit of time engaging with the transhumanist community, and we’ve seen a significant shift in the attitudes there. There are also a growing number of religious transhumanist associations. And recently, about 18 months ago, a number of us were participants in A Transhumanism and the Church, meaning the broad Christian Church, conference at Samford University.

Chris Bradford

It’s also interesting to see what kinds of things have come about technologically over the last 10, 11 years. Things that today just seem commonplace. For example, Netflix started streaming in 2007. YouTube was purchased by Google in 2006 and was Time Magazine’s person of the year that year, the same year the MTA was founded. Think about mobile technology. When the MTA was founded, the iPhone did not exist. It was introduced in 2007, as was the Kindle. Android phones came along in 2010, the iPad in 2010. We start to see wearable tech coming along. Google Glass, for example, was introduced in 2014. We start to see more smartwatches and fitness gear. Wearable technology.

Chris Bradford

How about social media space? Facebook changed from a focus simply on schools To open to the general public in 2006. Twitter came online in 2007 with broad adoption, and GitHub the open source software repository in 2007. Crowdsourced funding started in 2009 with Kickstarter, really, started to really take off.

Chris Bradford

Space exploration, the Mars rover launched in 2011, found water on Mars in 2014. Just recently, SpaceX. For the first time, reused a rocket.

Chris Bradford

Energy is changing rapidly. The introduction of With the introduction of solar shingles, the cost of solar and renewable energy is dropping rapidly.

Chris Bradford

Progress in fundamental physics The Large Hadron Collider, for example, came online in 2013.

Chris Bradford

We’re starting to see economic Changes. The gig economy, so to speak. Uber, which launched in 2009, Lyft in 2012. Airbnb, two thousand seven. TaskRabbit two thousand eight.

Chris Bradford

Changes in the education space with massive open online courses really starting to take off. In 2012, with Udacity and Coursera. And we start to see some of our own folks, including Ben Blair, moving into this space with online degrees with a teacher.

Chris Bradford

Advances in robotics. Many of you may have seen videos of advances with MIT in helping robots with achieving balance. Climbing stairs, walking on uneven terrain.

Chris Bradford

Medical technology. We now have DNA editing with CRISPR, 3D printed organs that are being used in human beings, such as jaw reconstructions, tracheal replacements. And the integration of AI with Watson helping with nursing questions.

Chris Bradford

And AI and voice recognition. Have come a tremendous way. In 2011, Watson won the Jeopardy Championship. In 2016, AlphaGo defeated a world champion. And many of us have in our pockets or in our homes assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant.

Chris Bradford

Autonomous vehicles. Google started really in about 2008 with autonomous vehicles, and we’re seeing this now with broader adoption with semi-autonomous vehicles as Tesla. Starts to roll that out.

Chris Bradford

Now we are starting to reach or to hear some projections that maybe we are nearing the top of the S curve. In technological progress, there’s a lot of talk about Moore’s Law and whether Moore’s Law will continue. Ray Kurzweil, of course, has given us to To potentially expand how we think about Moore’s Law, not just in the specific terms about density on computer chips, but more broadly about advances in technology. Well, Intel recently held a press conference about the progress with regard to Moore’s Law, and they project with the technologies that they’re developing, that they will continue to see the same kind of progress. Releases may be less frequent, but the overall rate of progress remains quite steady.

Chris Bradford

Now, one of the interesting things about that particular press conference is that they talked about The fact that in order to sustain Moore’s Law, they had to have faith in Moore’s Law. That is, it takes their action as a company. To make this prediction continue, hearkening back to my earlier readings of prophecy of the future from Scripture.

Chris Bradford

We are also seeing many changes in our society in the last 10 years. We experienced a recession in 2008 and We have not recovered from that fully. We see long-term economic consequences from that. We see radically different social interactions due to technology. And we see a lot of changes in religious affiliation with the growth of the nuns.

Chris Bradford

As I look back on the MTA’s efforts over the past ten and a half years, I’m very happy with what I’ve seen in our humanitarian efforts. where we have supported causes both in the U. S. and overseas, particularly in Africa. We have held and sponsored conferences published in books and papers, participated in symposia.

Chris Bradford

So what does the future of the MTA look like? Well, let’s take a little look ahead at what might be happening over the next five years. Last year, the World Economic Forum focused on what they call the fourth industrial revolution. This is really where we start to see the blurring of physical, digital and biological spheres. A convergence of technologies. This is not just You know, independent development of technologies, but we start to see these technologies converging. Technologies such as robotics. AI, nanotechnology, biotech, the Internet of Things, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles. And this has tremendous social implications.

Chris Bradford

They anticipate, their predictions anticipate that there will be a lot of Technological unemployment. There will also be opportunities created by this, but it requires a significant retooling of the workforce in order to take advantage of these opportunities. They forecast increasing inequality in income and wealth, which we’ve already been seeing over the past couple of decades. And this greater inequality has a potential for great social unrest.

Chris Bradford

And we forecast continued religious change. For example, and particularly for Mormonism, the LDS Church recently gave its statistical report and has seen the slowest, the lowest number of convert baptisms in thirty years, we’re definitely seeing some changes in the religious landscape.

Chris Bradford

So, what is the role of the MTA in this changing world? I want to share some of my own ideas and then talk a little bit about A recent board retreat at which we talked about the mission of the MTA and share a mission statement with you.

Chris Bradford

For me, the MTA grounds my feelings of faith in reason, and it emphasizes the grand vision at the roots of Mormonism. Which for me is the uniting of the human family. Now, I want us as an association, To branch out from our past ten years, where our focus has primarily been on influencing transhumanists to look more favorably on religion. To making transhumanism a household concept and to influence government, society, research, and industry to focus on the issues and the solutions relevant to transhumanism. I want the MTA to be involved politically and to lobby for consideration of social issues that are consequent to technological trends. I want to be clear that political and partisan are not the same thing. I want the MTA to be relied upon as a resource for people such as journalists who are interested in these issues. I want the MTA to be as focused on the T of the MTA as on the M. And I want the MTA to publish well received articulations of Mormon ideas that are accessible to a wide audience.

Chris Bradford

One of the things that we have done over the past year, since my election as president, is to engage more leaders In the leadership of the association. And we have a whole bunch of new board and management team members. If you are in the audience, if you are a board member or a management team member of the MTA, will you please stand up? Thank you. So take a look around at those people. If you haven’t met them, if you haven’t engaged with them, please do so. I’m very happy that we have a broader group of people who are involved in helping to run the association. And I’m looking forward to Blair, who will be talking about some of the specific initiatives and goals that we are. engaged in.

Chris Bradford

I mentioned in in January we had a retreat for The board members. We have a new group of had a new group of board members come on board, and we really wanted to talk about how we can effectively work as a board. And we have Come up with this new mission statement that I want to share with you. And it is this: The Mormon Transhumanist Association seeks to effectively mobilize resources, including human cultural and economic capital to promote the values expressed in the Transhumanist Declaration and the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation. To do this, the association will become recognized as a thought leader in integrating religion and science and raising awareness of their practical impacts on society. By drawing on distinctive Mormon theology and practice, emphasizing their transhumanist implications, And creating communal identity and enthusiasm around religious transhumanism, the association will exemplify a new paradigm for the role of religion in our increasingly technological world.

Chris Bradford

This effort requires all of us. We want to engage more with Mormonism. We have participated in conferences such as the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology, Sunstone, and others, and we want to continue and expand our influence there. We want to engage more in Public policy discussions and provide a better on-ramp for religious transhumanism. And Blair will talk more about that. A little later. And we want to grow and provide structure to groups outside of Utah. Before we started, I was chatting with a couple of folks from the Bay Area. talking about how we can expand our meetups there and expand our influence there.

Chris Bradford

And so in the spirit of Mormon leaders of the past, I want to also extend the invitation to you Those of you who are members of the association, every member, a missionary, we will be providing some resources for you that will help you. to reach out to people that you know and help them understand better what the MTA is about and where we can provide. an influence in society. I would love for us to see at the end of this year a thousand members of the MTA Where we’re now just over 600. And if we can reach out to our to share this vision with our friends and family, then I believe that we will be able to be the influence that we foresee. Thank you.