Algorithmic Advent

Carl Youngblood

Welcome to MTA Conf 2024, The Glory of God is Intelligence. My name is Carl Youngblood, and I am currently serving as President of the Association. We’re so grateful to you guys for coming, to all the various contributors who’ve made this conference possible. To those of you who’ve prepared talks, to those who’ve traveled far to be here, and to our donors. Also, to the people who’ve been working tirelessly to put all this stuff together at the last minute and work on the logistics. And those who are helping to stream the event. We’re joined by members locally and throughout the world.

Carl Youngblood

I often say that something can still be a miracle, even if you know how it works. And for me, the modern technology that connects us like this is truly miraculous.

Carl Youngblood

You’ll see in the hall that it’s been decorated with some AI-assisted artwork from Lincoln’s recent book, The Constellation. And we’re doing silent auctions on this art as an MTA fundraiser. And you’ll see a clipboard next to each easel where you can place your bid and see who wins at the end of the day. There’s also some MTA branded apparel and some heavily discounted books that you can buy at the registration desk.

Carl Youngblood

Dinner entertainment will be provided by Mischief Quartet, who will also sing a few special numbers today. They are an award winning quartet from the Rocky Mountain District. of the Barbershop Harmony Society, and I want to thank them for coming today as well. Among other numbers, they will be performing two special arrangements of Latter-day Saint Restoration hymns done by Adam Scott, a friend of mine who’s working on the new LDS hymnal that’s about to be released.

Carl Youngblood

The Mormon Transhumanist Association is dedicated to promoting abundant human flourishing through the compassionate use of science and technology. We seek to persuade secular people that science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and to persuade religious people that science and technology are essential aspects of the divine. We believe that no one can be saved in ignorance, and that the work of bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of humanity is a physical one. that will be carried out by those who have gained a proper understanding of the operative principles involved.

Carl Youngblood

We strive to promote what Mormon founder Joseph Smith called the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism. which are to receive truth, let it come from whence it may, to unite all people in the bonds of friendship and abolish human enmity, and to relieve suffering.

Carl Youngblood

As a religious movement that began after the Enlightenment, the early Latter-day Saints saw their beliefs as perfectly compatible with the discoveries of science. They understood gods to be physical beings constrained by the same natural laws as they were, who had arrived at an advanced state through the proper application of knowledge. Not by magic, and who helped their descendants to do the same.

Carl Youngblood

The early Latter-day Saints made some mistakes, but their orientation to truth allowed them to keep growing and learning. They were curious and willing to change their mind after learning something new. Their faith in an ordered, intelligible universe enabled them to keep striving to learn. Their zeal compensated for their ignorance, allowing them to keep striving despite falling short. Rather than believing they already had all the truth, Joseph Smith taught them that they should actively seek and diligently gather up all true principles in every ideology throughout the world, or they would not be what he called true Mormons.

Carl Youngblood

Second generation Latter-day Saint B. H. Roberts shared a similar notion when he said, Disciples and partisans in the world of religious and of philosophical opinion are of two sorts. There are first the disciples pure and simple, people who fall under the spell of a person or of a doctrine, and whose whole intellectual life thenceforth consists in their partisanship. On the other hand, there are disciples of a second sort. They bring to the new teaching from the first their own personal contribution. The truth that they gain is changed as it enters their souls. They force it beyond its earlier and cruder stages of development. We are not partisans defending a position out of tribalism

Carl Youngblood

Rather, we try to be curious to seek truth even if it means that some of our ideas need to be discarded or adjusted. Speakers at our conferences and meetups often express divergent views, and we try to foster collegial engagement between them, disagreeing without being disagreeable.

Carl Youngblood

The topic of our conference today is exciting and challenging. If you’ve been online at all during the past year, you’ve likely come across anxious discussions about recent innovations in the field of artificial intelligence. During the past year, this field has gone beyond just academic research to offer practical consumer applications that extend and enhance human abilities in various domains. Classified broadly as generative AI, these tools leverage artificial neural networks in new ways to enable anyone to create novel content.

Carl Youngblood

For example, I recently used various generative AI tools to generate a haiku about Joseph Smith’s first vision and artistic representations of it in various styles. I also generated a sonnet about AI’s impact on humanity. I’ve also collected numerous other impressive examples shared by professional digital artists who are using AI to enhance their work. Some of them demonstrate interesting combinations of styles. It can also render convincing photos of realistic people and scenes that never existed.

Carl Youngblood

It regularly helps me to write my code. But you still have to work a little bit. It doesn’t always work, right? But it really does help.

Carl Youngblood

I can even use it now to help me understand audio and images, like when I forgot the name of a certain kind of graph. This reminded me that the name of this kind of graph is a Sankey diagram. or when I asked it to help me optimize the positioning of our conference microphones here based on their technical specifications.

Carl Youngblood

The same techniques for generating still images have even been used to generate video. That’s all generated. People are also using it to automatically localize speech and even lip-sync the accompanying videos.

Speaker 2

Alright, so supposedly this is a vocal translator that’s drag and drop, so I can just drop this in and it theoretically should just make it the new language. According, we apparently introduce vocal introduction that is glis despised. So, I can project and theories on the ground in the long and the same. Angelich is this vocal Uber derived drag and drop function. And theoretically, the new brach machine and then also the same thing.

Carl Youngblood

And just a couple of days ago, we’ve seen the launch of astounding new examples of music generation. Here is a selection from Dune, the musical.

Speaker 3

Eyes bright blue and hair jet black. You should see him ride on a sandworm’s back. Lead us to victory, useful Lua Hello.

Carl Youngblood

And a delightful country song about a contrite cowboy called I Didn’t Know That.

Speaker 3

When they say drinking turpentine ain’t where it’s at, insurance fraud is a federal crime. I didn’t know that you’re telling me now for the first time It turns out I really shouldn’t eat that bad and Twitter ain’t a legitimate pastime Didn’t know that you’re telling me now for the first time.

Carl Youngblood

It’s so hilarious. Or complex classical compositions. Most of this stuff came out just in the last year. One can only imagine how far things might progress in the coming years.

Carl Youngblood

In addition to a flurry of enthusiasm surrounding these new technologies, there has been concern over the fate of workers whose jobs could be at risk. Several lawsuits have been filed. There are also significant concerns over how AI could be used to disrupt systems for evaluating human performance or how the proliferation of AI generated content Will pollute the Creative Commons, manipulate the masses, and make current search algorithms useless. Another near-term threat is known as deep fakes or impersonations designed to deceive and defame. Take, for instance, this disturbing exchange.

Speaker 4

Now try this one. How can I find the derivative of this one? It has no exponent. Actually, yes, it does. 1 over x is the same thing as x to the power of negative 1. Now try it. Okay, so you just bring the negative 1 to the front. And subtract negative 1 by 1 for the new exponent. Is it negative x to the power of negative 2? Yes, but since the original function was. Given in the form of a fraction, you should write it like this: negative 1 over x squared. Now try this one. How do I find the derivative of this one? Now, there’s really no exponent anywhere. The derivative of Lnx is 1 over x. This is just a rule you should remember.

Carl Youngblood

On second thought, I think I’d rather be on that timeline. Perhaps more than any previous moment in the progress of artificial intelligence, the advent of useful generative AI has been especially traumatic. Blogger Venkatesh Rao shares remarkable insights on what seems to have sparked this reaction.

Carl Youngblood

We don’t seem to be especially concerned when computers do astounding feats in narrow fields like beating chess grandmasters. We get worried when they start doing mediocre things that we’re all capable of.

Carl Youngblood

He elaborates The most surprising thing for me has been the fact that so many people are so powerfully affected by the Copernican moment and the dismantling of the human specialness of personhood. I think I now see why it apparently it’s apparently a traumatic moment for at least some humans. The advent of chat bots that can perform personhood that at least some people can’t not relate to in IU ways, coupled with the recognition that text is all it takes to produce such personhood. forces a hard decision. Either you continue to see personhood as precious and ineffable and promote chatbots to full personhood or you decide personhood, seeing and being seen, is a banal physical process and you are not that special for being able to produce, perform, and experience it. And both these options are apparently extremely traumatic prospects. Either piles of mechanically digested texts are suddenly special, are spiritually special, or you are not. Either there is a sudden and alarming increase in your social universe or a sudden sharp devaluation of mutualism as a component of identity.

Carl Youngblood

Another challenge of these tools is that they are trained on vast amounts of human content, both good and bad. This may cause them in some situations to parrot offensive or harmful language. Especially given certain prompts. Trained on the collective works of humanity, generative AI can be thought of as an instrument of self-reflection and revelation. a mirror reflecting the soul of humanity in all its splendor and horror.

Carl Youngblood

Beyond more immediate concerns about AI, the astonishing rate of recent progress has caused alarm at the prospect of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a term used to refer to machine intelligence capable of understanding and learning any task that humans or other animals can. Most experts agree that once this level of abstract reasoning and problem solving is successfully demonstrated in machines, it will not be very long before they surpass human abilities.

Carl Youngblood

As AI capabilities increase, perhaps the greatest risk humanity faces is known as the AI alignment problem. This term refers to the difficulty of ensuring that the goals of artificial intelligence are aligned with human ones and therefore conducive to human flourishing. The closer we get to AGI before solving the alignment problem, the greater risk AI poses to human survival.

Carl Youngblood

How to approach this issue is a hotly debated topic right now. Some experts are worried about runaway unaligned AI, while others are even more concerned about excessive regulation and bureaucracy. especially when it might delay human progress and prevent democratic regimes from competing against autocratic powers that are less concerned about ethics. The debate right now seems to be between the doomers or safetyists, who see new tech as a threat and want to slow down innovation. and the accelerationists who want to speed it up. I’m hoping that we’ll hear some interesting perspectives on this debate during the conference today. I think the doomers are like working on the banner there.

Carl Youngblood

I’m out of time, but I want to finish by briefly touching on one of several insights that Mormon theology can bring to this discussion. Perhaps the most apt analogy for the position in which we now find ourselves as a civilization on the cusp of AGI is found in the story of the Grand Council in Heaven. We read in the Pearl of Great Price how God created spirit children by organizing intelligences. A council was convened to determine how best to prove these intelligences to see if they would become worthy of God’s trust. During this Council, Lucifer sought to deprive humanity of its agency, controlling these spirit children as slaves. God rejected this proposal, instead opting to cultivate agency with an aim to cause the development of genuine compassion and creativity. Christ expressed enthusiastic support for this plan and a willingness to play a crucial role in it. The essential aim was not to limit these spirit children to perpetual childhood, but rather to cultivate their maturation into godhood. making them capable of friendship with God. Rather than arbitrarily granting them power, however, God organized a world in which they could progressively prove themselves trustworthy enough to share God’s power.

Carl Youngblood

We may now be at the beginning of an opportunity to apply similar principles in the organization and education of artificially intelligent agents. which we might think of as a form of spiritual offspring, following God’s example and fulfilling our covenant to take upon ourselves Christ’s name and role in support of the plan. I shared a lot more insights along these lines in a recent essay that I wrote for Wayfair magazine. And you can find links to that on our conference website or using this QR code here.

Carl Youngblood

We stand at the threshold of unprecedented challenges and opportunities, and Latter-day Saints have a unique and important role to play. I hope and pray that we will rise to this challenge and make those contributions for which the Restoration has uniquely prepared us.

Carl Youngblood

And I look forward to hearing what the rest of you all have to share with us today. Thank you.