AI in our Futures Part 6: The Engine of AI Acceleration – The Three-Driver Hypothesis

The confounding speed of the AI revolution is not an accident, and it is not just the result of clever people making bold decisions. It is the outcome of three interlocking forces that, once understood, explain why no government, corporation, or individual can slow this down. It also explains why the Church may be the only institution positioned to respond meaningfully. Introduction to the Three Drivers My son Lance and I have written a book to try to make sense of the speeding AI tsunami and how we as Jesus-followers should respond. It is aimed at Christian Leaders, but its core message is for all. More about the book later, but for now, I want to introduce you to the hidden engine that drives the ever-accelerating flywheel of change. I have called this the Three-Driver Hypothesis, and this graphic will help explain it: Think of the engine as three interlocking cogs turning faster and faster, and generating immense power and reaching unexpected velocity. The top cog is Technology, and the left-hand one is Geopolitics. I will go into a little detail in this article, but in short, these two are defined as follows: 1. Technology is the actual flywheel, and it is obvious to almost everyone. It represents the development and adoption of AI and robotics. Billions have been poured into massive AI tech developments, now far exceeding the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of many mid-sized countries. Let that sink in – The investment in AI development equals the total monetary value of all finished goods and services produced within a country's borders during a specific period. The most visible parts of this flywheel are the AI laboratories that build AI and enhance it on an almost weekly basis. Companies like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, XAi, and several others offer both free and subscription versions of Large Language Models (LLM) like Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Grok – names as familiar today as Microsoft Windows, Meta, Google Search and so on. These are some of the massive corporations that have taken us from Calculators to electronic brains that are already smarter and more efficient than almost everyone you and I are likely to know, and they are getting more powerful all the time. Sure, they do not always display common sense and are noticeably short on creative thought. However, they provide billions in value to millions of people at little or no cost, and their products are, in one form or another, on our desks and in our pockets. They are even in our TV sets, our SmartGlasses, and almost everything else we use every day. If AI were a virus, most of human society would already be incurably infected … and perhaps it is. Every day, the Technology flywheel, Driver One, spins faster and faster, and just thinking too much about it makes our heads spin. 2. The second driver is Geopolitics. It is not just big businesses that are focused on AI; it is also nations. Put simply, the nation that masters AI first will be the nation that rules the world, or at least this is how world leaders see it. The main reason for this claim is something called autonomous recursive learning and development, and this means that AIs are so smart that they are already self-improving. Model 1 helps develop Model 2, which builds Model 3 under human supervision, and Model 3 develops Model 4 all by itself. Model 1 is smart, Model 2 is brilliant, Model 3 is beyond understanding, and Model 4 is “god-like”. This, of course, is a simplified illustration rather than a technical roadmap, but the trajectory it captures is precisely what AI researchers are describing. I don’t use that ascription lightly, and I will explain it when I introduce the third Driver in this strange trinity. Introduction to the Book: The Acts 8 Moment Here is how The Acts 8 Moment book describes the first two drivers. To navigate the Hinge Period, we must look beyond the daily headlines of stock market fluctuations and software updates. We must understand the structural forces that are propelling us toward this new epoch. In our strategic analysis, we have identified three distinct, convergent drivers that ensure this revolution will not stall. We call this the Three-Driver Hypothesis. Understanding these drivers is essential for church leaders. Without this framework, the speed of change looks like chaos. With it, the speed of change is revealed as a calculated, inevitable trajectory. Driver One: The Technological Flywheel The first driver is the technology itself, which has entered a phase of recursive self-improvement. We are no longer dealing with linear progress, where humans painstakingly write better code. We are entering a cycle where AI helps build better AI. This is the “Flywheel.” The breakthroughs we witnessed in late 2024 and early 2025 – specifically the move to “System 2” reasoning models like OpenAI’s o3 and DeepSeek’s R1 – have closed the loop. These systems can now debug their own code, optimise their own architectures, and generate the synthetic data needed to train their successors. When you combine this self-improving software with the physical amplifiers of quantum computing and advanced robotics, you get an engine of innovation that spins faster than human cognition can track. The "data wall" has been breached; the machine is beginning to teach itself. Driver Two: The Race for Dominance (The Moloch Trap) If technology were the only driver, humanity might collectively decide to slow down for the sake of safety. Driver Two ensures that we cannot. This is the geopolitical and corporate arms race - a dynamic game theorists call the "Moloch Trap." As we saw with the Stargate Project and the DeepSeek shock, the United States and China are locked in an existential contest for sovereignty. This is not friendly market competition; it is a winner-takes-all battle for the future. The logic of the race dictates that safety margins must be sacrificed for speed. If a US lab pauses to ensure a model is safe, they risk being overtaken by a Chinese lab that did not pause. This dynamic destroys the “off switch.” It forces rational actors – governments and corporations – to take irrational risks, driving the timeline of deployment forward regardless of the societal cost. Some words and phrases from the book will probably seem strange to you – Hinge Period, Moloch Trap and so on – but these are explained in the book, and there is also a Glossary of Terms. The big idea is that technology development and corporate and government ambition are resulting in a rapidly escalating race towards Super Artificial Intelligence. This race is at an almost incomprehensible speed, and it is creating changes that will affect all of our lives at every level. The Hidden Third Driver Drivers 1 and 2 explain what is happening, but do not explain ‘why’ it is happening. Driver 3 does explain much of the ‘why’ of it, but you will seldom or ever read about this – here it is, once again, as an extract from the book The Acts 8 Moment: Driver Three: The Spiritual Accelerant The first two drivers are widely recognised by secular analysts. The third driver is visible only through spiritual lenses, yet it is the most critical for the Church to understand. We posit that the acceleration of AI is being fueled by a spiritual ambition as old as Eden: the Luciferian impulse to be “like God.” We are not speaking merely metaphorically here. As Christians, we believe there is an active spiritual intelligence - the biblical Satan - who shapes human desires toward ‘transcendence’ without repentance. In theological terms, we understand this as a deeper layer behind the human dynamics described by Drivers One and Two. We do not claim this as an empirically testable mechanism, but as a confessional reading of the age in light of Scripture. However, we see this evidenced in the language of the tech elite who speak of "summoning the digital god" or achieving immortality through "uploading consciousness." It is the spirit of Babel reborn - a unified human attempt to achieve omniscience (all-knowing AI), omnipotence (agentic AI), and immortality (transhumanism) apart from the Creator. This spiritual driver explains the fervour of the age. It explains why brilliant men and women are building machines that they admit could destroy them. They are blinded by the promise of a counterfeit glory. At the surface, there are two main reasons offered by politicians and technology leaders for their hell-bent pursuit of developing powerful AI as quickly as possible. That AI is a good thing and will offer many wonderful benefits to humanity, ultimately ushering in a utopian age of heaven on earth. If ‘bad’ players achieve Superintelligence first, then they will subjugate all opposition. What they mean by this is that if their own corporations reach the goal first, then they will dominate and eliminate all opposition, but if the opposition wins the race, then their companies and personal wealth will be wiped out. At a national level, it is even starker. For the USA, if Russia or China win the race, then it is game over for American society. The stakes are high, but in the fog of war caused by these forces, few seem concerned about what the outcomes will be for ordinary people. I foresee a coming personal crisis of identity, worth, and purpose. If I no longer have a job, or just don’t need to work or achieve, struggle and overcome, innovate and create, then who am I, what am I worth, and what is my purpose in this world? So, whether we have a godless heaven on earth or a societal hell, the outcome for most people is likely to be the same. We are designed by the Almighty to be industrious people of clear identity and purpose. When we lose our sense of identity, worth, and purpose, then we inevitably fall into the pit of self-destructive despondency and hopelessness. The answers to the questions of “who am I, what am I worth,...