# Exponential Change

Technological development follows an exponential growth curve—a pattern Mormon prophecy anticipates in the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times. Recognizing accelerating change, and its risks, is essential preparation for the future.

A chambered nautilus in cross-section
The truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that’s something peculiar to our time. I don’t think our grandparents had to live with that.
So that means that the twentieth century wasn’t a hundred years of change at today’s rate of change, because we’ve been speeding up. It was actually twenty years of change at today’s rate of change. Exponential change is quite explosive, so in the next century we’ll make about twenty thousand years of change at today’s rate of progress—about a thousand times greater than the twentieth century, and that century was no slouch for change.
The Apollo mission control room
Moore’s Law is really a thing about human activity, it’s about vision, it’s about what you’re allowed to believe. Because people are really limited by their beliefs, they limit themselves by what they allow themselves to believe about what is possible.
Carver Mead’s observation deserves emphasis. Moore’s Law is not a law of nature; it is a record of sustained human effort, coordinated vision, and faith in what is possible. Exponential progress happens because communities of people keep believing it can and keep working to make it so. In this sense, the most famous exponential trend in technology is also a parable about faith and works.We don’t know how far these trends will go, but the practical impact of what Moore’s Law describes on society in the past 50 years is almost impossible to overstate. Recognizing and understanding the difference between linear and exponential progress is essential in preparing for the future.A singular DispensationMormon theology already has a name for an epoch of accelerating, culminating change: the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times. Mormons understand the present era as one in which God’s work is accelerating—in which all the truths, blessings, and powers of past ages are being restored and gathered, and “many great and important things” are yet to be revealed. Much like the accelerating change anticipated by futurists, Mormons envision a swift and comprehensive unfolding of God’s work in the present age.
Some of the latest and highest achievements of man in the utilization of natural forces approach the conditions of spiritual operations. To count the ticking of a watch thousands of miles away; to speak in but an ordinary tone and be heard across the continent; to signal from one hemisphere and be understood on the other though oceans roll and roar between; to bring the lightning into our homes and make it serve as fire and torch; to navigate the air and to travel beneath the ocean surface; to make chemical and atomic energies obey our will—are not these miracles?
A lighthouse on a rocky coast