Book Review: We Are As Gods

https://www.amazon.com/Are-Gods-Abundance-Exponential-Technology/dp/1668099543

The latest book by Peter Diamandis. The book can be divided into two parts - the first 6 chapters gives a rundown on abundance, while the last 3 chapters cover ways to navigate an abundance era. I find the later parts much more insightful - because they explore concepts I didn’t find in one of his earlier books, “The Future Is Faster Than You Think.”

I’ll share the concepts and ideas that I found most thought-provoking or useful - mostly from the second half. I found some of Peter’s earlier books too optimistic. But this book has equal parts optimism, caution, and more importantly, concrete advice on how to navigate the future. I think it'll be a refreshing read for those unsure of how to handle the upcoming era of exponential acceleration and uncertainty.

We use analogies to understand the unknown, to turn novelty into familarity. And it’s these analogies that allow us to reimagine the existing, and reshape entire fields. Neuroscience took a leap when researchers started comparing the brain to a computer - giving rise to AI, Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs), etc.

Analogies are a product of lateral thinking - the ability to make unexpected connections between unrelated ideas. And there is some comfort knowing (right now) that AI can remix ideas at speed, but cannot intuit what hasn’t been imagined - it hits a wall when trying to have wild leaps between weird ideas. The 2026 experiment “Machina Mirabilis” trained an LLM on pre-1900 text to test if it could come up with then-unseen ideas like quantum mechanics - it mostly failed. With AI, brute-force logic is no longer an edge, but the ability to bridge domains and ask better questions - that still is.

But abundance isn’t all joy and wonder. Quote: “When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.” We’re forced to confront new questions and challenges. What happens when all material needs are met, when we do not have to work for our survival? What becomes of our purpose? Do we even want to live in such a world?

There’s also the abundance paradox, where new solutions harbour unintended consequences; n-th order effects. Social media has shortened our attention spans and subverted our mental health, through algorithms tweaked to pump out synthetic highs. The same forces that drive economic progress also drive population decline - increased education, higher economic opportunities - all these lead to lower or delayed births.

But there are ways to navigate an era of abundance. It starts with having agency - when we believe that the future is being created by us, rather than happening to us. By reframing how we interpret a situation, our mindset changes - AI as an existential threat triggers terror, but AI as an opportunity to reskill unlocks agency.

Up till now, our mental machinery has evolved in a world of scarcity. Upgrading our biology (e.g. biohacking) doesn’t mean we upgrade our psychology. We default to loss aversion, zero-sum thinking. By reframing resources as something that is expandable through collaboration and iteration, we expand the possibilities and learn to bake more pies.

Two tools helps us reframe: Assumption Questioning (what stories are we telling ourselves? what else might be true?), and Novelty Exposure (biases thrive on repetition; seek new experiences, environments to expand your cognitive flexibility).

In an abundance era, creativity is a vital survival skill. And like a muscle, it isn’t innate but trainable. Creativity microdosing - like 15 minutes a day of writing or drawing - widens perspectives, spark insights, and rewire the brain.

But mental skill isn’t enough - we need action to thrive. And that’s where flow comes in the picture; a peak state of total absorption where the brain processes information much quickly and with less friction. And like creativity, flow is a trainable skill.

Flow states have triggers - some for individual flow, some for group flow.

Flow follows focus - when our attention is locked on the task at hand, and in the present. So, start by having complete concentration: turn off your notifications, your emails, have all necessary conversations in advance. Aim for 90-min deep-work blocks, because like our 90-110 min sleep cycle, our brain also has a similar 90-110 min awake-and-alert cycle.

Flow is also triggered by clear goals. When we have a specific mission, we stay on task. When we don’t know what we want to accomplish, our mind wanders trying to figure it out.

There’s also the challenge-skills balance. Flow needs focus. If the challenge is too easy, boredom takes over and attention flags. If it is too hard, anxiety overwhelms us. That’s why the best games hit the sweet spot of difficulty. Flow is the direct result when we hit the sweet spot of difficulty.

Play is another foundational infrastructure of the mind that help us thrive. It evolved to experiment and explore in an environment free from danger and consequence. Activating only in safety, and is the emotion designed for a world of abundance. It drives critical behavior: creative exploration, social connection, skills development.

Human-AI collaboration is the new frontier. People who do it well are called Centaurs - capable of combining human creative intuition and expertise with AI’s raw computational power. By having an intuitive, distraction-free design, users can focus on the task at hand and enter flow. Through real-time feedback, the brain sharpens focus as it doesn’t have to wonder about how to improve performance.

But AI also has its set of problems. The last mile problem is one - how do we ensure equal distribution of intelligence for all? This is no longer a problem of technological capability or infrastructure, but one of human behavior. Whether we can trust, coordinante, and have shared intentions. We do not lack the tools to solve global problems; what we lack is the ability to act together at the scale required.

Back to a question we asked earlier: “Do we want to live in a post-scarcity world?” The 1968 experiment - Universe 25 - explores what happens to mouse society when all its material needs are met. What are the consequences of abundance without purpose? After 560 days, mice found it difficult to establish territories and find social roles. Some gave up on social interaction, obsessively grooming themselves while withdrawing completely from society.

In this case, the utopia wasn’t felled by physical conditions like starvation or disease, but by psychological and social ones - the complete collapse of social bonds and behavior. They lost the ability to live together, and in the end, to live at all. Abundance, without direction, is a trap.

We can see these parallels in human society. The book calls it “social overcrowding” - the loss of social roles and meaningful connections in an environment of material abundance. We already live in an abundance of digital content. The recent 2026 paper “Is the iPhone Birth Control?” suggests that iPhone diffusion explains 33-52% of the post-2007 decline in the US general fertility rate among women aged 15-44 - due to a variety of factors including reduced in-person interaction, more porn usage, and lower sexual frequency. In that sense, smartphones provide an environmental change that weakens the social pathways through which relationships, sex, and childbearing normally occur.

Movies portray us navigating plentitude in two directions. First, the dire. In the Matrix, humans become batteries for an AI that lulls us into submission. In WALL-E, people surrender their agency to AI through endless entertainment on their hover chairs. But Startrek offers another direction - the aspirational. When the struggle to survive ends, then begins our quest to evolve. To explore beyond the galaxy.

Our brains crave the easy. If we let AI do all the cognitive heavy lifting, our own mental capacities will atrophy. We see this in the Google effect, where we tend to forget information that is easily accessible online. We go from being a dictionary to a lookup table. By oursourcing our work to AI, we offload - not just our memory but cognition, creativity, and meaning itself.

There are some ways to handle AI-augmented creativity. Never let AI conjure the original work and short-circuit your mind’s retrieval system. Don’t let machines remove all friction, because its the effort of wrestling with an idea that sharpens thought. Keep parts of your life untouched, uninfluenced by technology. And don’t let AI’s predictive patterns strip our work of surprise and novelty, lest we lose creativity itself. The sharper the tool, the sharper the user must become - so use AI to enhance our thinking, not to think for us.

Comfort is an enemy. We need challenges. Failure is a precondition for success, and in a future where AI minimizes error, we risk losing the conditions that make growth possible. So, we need uncertainty. We need awe to reset the brain, expand our perspective, and quiet our ego.

Longevity also forces us to ask new questions. What would we do with 50-100 more years? We face a different problem: not how to stay alive but how to stay human.

For most of history, we didn’t have to manufacture meaning - everyday was a strive to put food on the table. But the more we decouple life from survival, the more we need to find or invent reasons to get out of our beds every morning.

In a post-scarcity world, absence of external struggles mean we need to generate drive from within. We must turn to our intrinsic motivators of curiosity, passion, purpose.

Then, the bottleneck to longevity is not biological, but increasingly mental, emotional, perhaps even spiritual. The tools that lengthen life are here, but what about the tools that make life worth living?

The new work in an era of abundance is creation, growth, self-expression, and meaning-making.

The book gave me some new perspectives while reinforcing beliefs I already had. The question, then, is what to do from here.

I think the small actions we take today will eventually compound into something useful. Conversely, the small shortcuts we let AI take on our behalf may quietly weaken us over time.

For me, it starts with practicing focus. It might mean powering off my phone while I work, or going back to pen and paper when planning if my computer becomes too distracting. And not using AI to generate my first drafts before I have done the thinking myself.

Being attuned to one’s mental state is another underrated superpower. I think it becomes easier when we quiet down: when we stop constantly bombarding ourselves with information, watching videos at 2x speed, or scrolling through our phones even in the toilet. Sometimes, we need to let the mind wander, to be bored.