# Future Shock

Explore Future Shock through a Mormon Transhumanist lens—examining how accelerating change reshapes faith, humanity, and our vision of what lies ahead.

Scripture recognizes the trial that Alvin Toffler named future shock. In Israel's wilderness and in the revelations of the Restoration, God paces change to human capacity and condemns those who refuse to receive more.

Future shock is the stress and disorientation people suffer when they face "too much change in too short a time." The futurist Alvin Toffler coined the phrase in a 1965 magazine essay and made it a household term with his 1970 bestseller, *Future Shock*. He modeled it on culture shock, moving the traveler's dislocation from space into time. The symptoms he described include anxiety, fatigue from too many decisions, and either retreat into old habits or hostility toward the new. Future shock is usually treated as a disorder of industrial modernity. The scriptures, however, describe the same trial in older terms.

## Manna and the Fleshpots of Egypt

Israel's first months in the wilderness read as a case history of future shock.

The murmuring of the Israelites against Moses is usually read as a story of ingratitude. Their complaints also track, with some precision, the symptoms Toffler described. A nation of slaves left Egypt in a single night, and within weeks they woke to food they could not name: "they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was" (Exodus 16:15). The Hebrew *man hu'* behind "It is manna" is usually read as a question, "What is it?", so the bread of heaven took its name from the people's bewilderment. Under strain they looked backward, wishing they had died "in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots" (Exodus 16:3). Later they remembered "the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons," and complained that "there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes" (Numbers 11:5-6). They remembered Egypt's food and said nothing of its bondage.

Interpreters have often read the forty years in the wilderness as a pattern of preparation as well as judgment, repeated in Lehi's journey through the wilderness. Apart from Joshua and Caleb, the adults who left Egypt did not enter the promised land. Their children, who had eaten manna all their lives, did. Change on that scale took a generation, and later revelation would state the principle of pacing outright.

## Line upon Line

Restoration scripture condemns both the refusal of new revelation and the demand to receive all of it at once.

It is significant that one Book of Mormon passage names both failures. Nephi pronounces a woe on anyone who says, "We have received the word of God, and we need no more of the word of God, for we have enough," and then gives the Lord's alternative: "I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little" (2 Nephi 28:29-30). Stagnation is one danger. The other is change faster than anyone can absorb, and a revelation of 1831 told the early elders, "ye are little children and ye cannot bear all things now; ye must grow in grace and in the knowledge of the truth" (D&C 50:40). The pace of revelation is matched to the capacity of those who receive it, and that capacity is expected to grow.

The Restoration itself tested that capacity. When Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon recorded their vision of the degrees of glory in 1832, many converts raised on a strict division of heaven and hell were unsettled, and Brigham Young later recalled that it was "a great trial to many." The vision ran against his own education, he said, and he read and prayed over it until he understood it for himself. Mormon transhumanists describe the present dispensation, the last era before Christ's return, as an age of accelerating change in knowledge and technology. Continuing revelation, on that reading, helps a people take in change at a pace it can bear.

## The Spiritual and Physical Creations

Present technology gives the old problem new force, and Restoration scripture offers a way to meet it.

Artificial intelligence now changes from month to month, faster than schools, professions, and laws can adjust. In early 2024 an American film producer paused an $800 million studio expansion after seeing software generate video from written prompts. For Mormon transhumanists, part of the remedy lies in the doctrine of creation. The Lord God "created all things … spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth" (Moses 3:5). A people with a clear vision of what it hopes to become, they argue, can direct technological change toward that end instead of only reacting to it. The doctrine carries its own risk. Those who hold a vision and the means to build it can set a pace that others must absorb, and the shock falls hardest on those with the least say.

Scripture does not promise that change will slow. When the Lord, in a revelation of March 1831, recounted the signs and upheavals of the last days, his disciples "were troubled." He answered, "Be not troubled, for, when all these things shall come to pass, ye may know that the promises which have been made unto you shall be fulfilled" (D&C 45:34-35). The disciples received no schedule. They were told to read the upheaval as the keeping of promises already made to them.

*See also*: [Accelerating Change](/topical-guide/accelerating-change), [Agency](/topical-guide/agency), [Artificial General Intelligence](/topical-guide/artificial-general-intelligence), [Artificial Intelligence](/topical-guide/artificial-intelligence), Cognitive Overload, [Existential Risk](/topical-guide/existential-risk), [Immortality](/topical-guide/immortality), [Last Days](/topical-guide/last-days), [Longevity](/topical-guide/longevity), Moral Injury, [Post-Scarcity Economy](/topical-guide/post-scarcity-economy), [Posterity](/topical-guide/posterity), [Singularity](/topical-guide/singularity), Technological Disruption, [Technological Singularity](/topical-guide/technological-singularity)