Accelerating Change
Accelerating change describes the pattern in which each wave of innovation shortens the time before the next. Tools make better tools; knowledge compounds; the intervals between transformations compress. Ray Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge, and others formalized this observation in the twentieth century, projecting exponential curves toward a threshold beyond which familiar categories of human experience would no longer reliably hold. But the intuition runs deeper than any modern theory. Sacred narratives across many traditions read history not as a flat cycle but as a directed intensification—a progressive unfolding of purpose that quickens as it approaches fulfillment.
The Scriptures Anticipated a Quickening
The flood of knowledge in Doctrine and Covenants 121:33 envisions learning poured out in great abundance.
Mormon theology frames this acceleration as divinely orchestrated. The Doctrine and Covenants speaks of knowledge flowing from the earth as from a flood (D&C 121:33) and of God hastening his work in its time (D&C 88:73). Joseph Smith taught that revelation would come line upon line, with an implied trajectory toward a fullness. The intensifying natural and social disruptions described in Matthew 24 are building directly toward a climactic, transformative event. Mormon transhumanist theology reads these passages as anticipations of what complexity theorists now call emergent phase transitions: moments when quantitative accumulation culminates in qualitative change.
Eternal Progression Has No Ceiling
The theological stakes are sharpest in the doctrine of eternal progression. If God progressed to divinity through processes continuous with those available to humanity—as the King Follett discourse implies—then the technological acceleration of human capacities is not foreign to divine life but potentially constitutive of it. To engage wisely with accelerating change is, on this reading, an act of discipleship. The Mormon transhumanist tradition has consistently held that science and technology, rightly ordered, are among the ordained means by which intelligence develops toward Godhood. Acceleration is the tempo at which that development is now running.
Computation, Biology, and the Compression of Centuries
Genomic sequencing charts a compressed century of discovery from costly trials to affordable access.
The empirical record bears out the pattern. Processing power compounded for decades, seeding expectations of further compounding. Genomic sequencing costs collapsed from billions of dollars to hundreds within a single generation, opening medicine to individual biology in ways previously impossible. Nanotechnology promises manipulation of matter at the molecular scale. Artificial intelligence systems have moved, in rapid succession, from narrow task performance to generalist capability in language, reasoning, and creative production. Reusable launch technology has reopened the prospect of a multi-planetary civilization. Each of these curves interacts with the others, and the interactions themselves accelerate.
Risk scales with capability
Risk scales with capability. Concentrated power, ecological disruption, autonomous systems that erode human agency, and the amplification of cruelty alongside compassion are already visible in early form, and they will intensify. The transhumanist temptation is to treat acceleration as automatically redemptive. Mormon transhumanism rejects that assumption: technology is a means, and the end is Zion, and Zion requires wisdom and compassion as much as it does power.
Acceleration as Vocation
For Mormon transhumanists, accelerating change is a moral imperative. To navigate it well is to practice participatory atonement: harnessing growing power in the work of reconciliation and healing, to the benefit of all. The scriptural promise is not that change will simply happen to humanity, but that humanity, awakened and consecrated, will become a purposeful agent of transformation. Acceleration, on this account, is an invitation to become the kind of intelligence that a universe designed for eternal progression was always destined to bring forth.