Redshift

When AI Acceleration Outpaces Us

Some time ago, I had a cross-country flight with a connector in Chicago.

The first leg ran behind, and I kept glancing at my watch, watching my connection window disappear in real time.

Undaunted, when we landed, I flat-out ran to the gate.
Only to find it closed.

What I remember most clearly was the sinking feeling that followed, standing there as the plane I was supposed to be on began to fade into the distance.

Watching it get farther (and faster) away, while there was nothing I could do about it.

That feeling reminded me of something I learned in school.

Redshift.

It’s an astronomical term for a quiet but unsettling discovery: the farther away something is in the universe, the faster it is moving away from us.

What makes redshift so disorienting isn’t just distance, but acceleration. Objects aren’t merely receding. They are receding faster the farther they go.

Kind of like my plane did.

I’m no astronomer, but it increasingly feels like we’re living through a redshift right now.
And it’s spelled A-I.

Not long ago, AI could barely hold a conversation. It hallucinated basic facts and fell apart the moment you asked it to reason or remember context.

Image generation was clumsy and often strange.
These weren’t edge cases. They were the definition of what AI was.

And then, very quickly, they weren’t.

Systems that once struggled to produce coherent responses now sustain long, fluid conversations.

What was brittle pattern matching now tutors, drafts, diagnoses, and designs.

Images went from distorted curiosities to photorealistic scenes on demand. All of this happened so fast it barely registered as change.

Almost overnight.

This is the redshift effect in real time.

The technology isn’t just advancing. It’s advancing faster than our ability to form stable mental models about what it is, what it’s for, and what it’s doing to us.

And when change happens this quickly, it doesn’t just alter what we can do. It alters how we understand ourselves.

The shift happens faster than we can accommodate it.

For those who think in spiritual terms, this moment calls for something quieter than strategy and deeper than reaction.

What’s needed first is attention.

A willingness to notice how acceleration itself reshapes imagination, formation, and trust. Before asking how AI can be used, communities of faith may need to ask how speed is already discipling us.

In a culture trained to move fast and optimize constantly, the most countercultural act may be to slow the conversation down long enough to ask better questions. Not what can we do with this?
But what is this doing to us?

And perhaps more importantly, what do we refuse to relinquish?

If there is a way forward, it likely won’t come from more acceleration or better messaging.

It will come from slowing interpretation down, treating meaning as something uniquely ours to protect, and resisting the assumption that whatever arrives next must automatically be good, inevitable, or neutral.

It’s a start.