Recommended by Elon Musk, what on earth does this must-read masterpiece of 2026 talk about?

In December 1968, Apollo 8 entered lunar orbit. Astronaut William Anders pointed his camera at the Earth and pressed the shutter. The photo was called "Earthrise". Above the gray lunar surface, a blue planet slowly rose.

After seeing this photo, Stewart Brand, the founder of Whole Earth Catalog, said, "We are as gods and we might as well get good at it." It means that humans already have the ability to change the course of this planet and are responsible for learning to use this ability well.

58 years later, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler named a new book We Are as Gods and asked all of humanity: We do have this ability, but do we have the wisdom worthy of this ability?

Let me briefly introduce these two authors.

Peter Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of Singularity University and the founder of the XPRIZE Foundation. He has successively established XPRIZEs in fields such as AI, robotics, environmental protection, automobiles, and health, and has founded more than 20 companies in fields such as longevity and venture capital.

He is also one of the "50 Outstanding Global Leaders" by Fortune magazine in 2014 and one of the "250 Greatest Innovators in the United States" by Forbes in 2026. He has accurately predicted the trend of global technology many times.

Steven Kotler is a New York Times best - selling author. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times, and his works have been translated into more than 80 languages and cover more than 130 countries around the world. He is often on the front - line at Silicon Valley, NASA, and XPRIZE summits, deeply anchoring the global technological frontier.

Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, and Sam Altman found a common coordinate system in this book regarding their judgments on the era of technological abundance.

The science writer Wan Weigang commented: This book is not about whether AI will replace humans, but about whether we can control ourselves. This is the most advanced topic you can read in the era of singularity.

A fact is emerging: Technology has become a god, but your brain is still in the Stone Age.

In this article, we will comprehensively dissect the book We Are as Gods, which has been widely welcomed in the technology and business circles recently.

Hope today's sharing will inspire you.

I. "Miracles" Have Become Everyday Occurrences

Every day when you turn on your phone, AI helps you write emails, make PPTs, translate foreign languages, generate pictures, and analyze data.

Diamandis calls these the "miracle list". He wrote in the book: The miracles that humans once prayed for are now our daily life.

The question is, how do you feel about these miracles?

Most likely, you don't feel anything. You won't wake up every morning thinking, "My goodness, I have a device in my pocket that is millions of times more powerful than the Apollo navigation computer." You'll only think, "Why is my phone out of power again?"

It's not your fault. It's your brain that's causing this. Evolution has equipped humans with a brain that is about 200,000 years old. This set of hardware is suitable for avoiding lions, tracking prey, and remembering which trees have fruits on the African savannah. It has a fatal flaw: The brain is linear, while the current world is exponential.

Now, the amount of information you receive every day exceeds what a medieval noble saw in a lifetime. However, the way your brain processes this information is not much different from that in the Stone Age: Linear extrapolation, near - term preference, and loss aversion.

Biologist E. O. Wilson once wrote: "We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god - like technology."

Since the 1956 Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference in the United States, AI technology has been developing for 70 years, but the brain hasn't been updated even once. This is the most troublesome thing in the AI era: The cognitive hardware can't keep up with this era.

II. The 6D Framework:

How Technology Transforms from "Toy - like" to "Crushing You"

How to judge when a technology will explode, when to enter the market, and when it will be eliminated? Diamandis and Kotler provided an extremely sharp tool: the 6D framework.

Any exponential technology will go through six stages from its birth to subverting the world.

1. Digitalization

For example, cameras have become the cameras in mobile phones, records have become MP3s, and maps have become GPS signals. Once digitalized, it rides on the fast track of Moore's Law, with its performance doubling and cost halving every 18 to 24 months.

2. Deceptiveness

This is the most dangerous stage. The technology seems like a toy, with poor performance and a bad experience. Big companies don't even bother to look at it.

This was the case with the Internet in 1995. All traditional media were laughing at it. However, the growth of the exponential curve is extremely slow in the early stage, and the change is almost invisible to the naked eye until it crosses the inflection point.

For example, the engineers at Kodak invented the digital camera as early as 1975, but the company's management regarded it as a toy and ignored the exponential doubling of pixels, storage, and computing power.

The development of these technologies soon led to the elimination of film cameras. When this trend really emerged, Kodak was on the verge of bankruptcy.

3. Disruptiveness

After crossing the inflection point, the old industries start to collapse within a few years. When the iPhone was released in 2007, Nokia's mobile phone still had the largest global market share. But six years later, in 2013, Nokia's mobile phone business was sold to Microsoft for 5.44 billion euros.

In November 2022, ChatGPT was released. By 2024, a large number of translation and other jobs began to disappear, which took two years.

Disruption is not gradual but cliff - like. By the time you react, it's too late.

4. Dematerialization

Technology makes things that used to cost money become cheaper or even free. Twenty years ago, you had to buy cameras, voice recorders, navigators, calculators, flashlights, alarm clocks, and maps. Now, they are all free in your mobile phone.

Today's AI is also making the marginal cost of writing copy, doing design, writing code, and translating approach zero.

5. Dematerialization, the Disappearance of Physical Forms

You no longer need CDs, DVDs, bank branches, or physical stores. Everything is in the cloud. The next thing to disappear may be the screen itself.

6. Popularization, Technology Becomes Accessible to Everyone

In 2003, it cost 3 billion US dollars to sequence a person's genome, and only national - level laboratories could afford it. Now? It costs less than 200 US dollars, and you can place an order at home.

Look at satellite Internet. It used to be exclusive to the military, and you couldn't even think about it. When Elon Musk's Starlink was first launched, the monthly fee was 99 US dollars. Now, the average monthly fee for global users has dropped to just over 80 US dollars, and it's as low as 40 US dollars per month in some developing countries.

This is the power of technology popularization: When something changes from being affordable only to a few people to being accessible to everyone, power will be dispersed from the hands of a few people, and new entrepreneurial opportunities will emerge in this gap.

The book contains several case studies, each of which is a living specimen of a different stage of the 6D framework.

In 2016, Zipline used drones to deliver blood to remote clinics in Rwanda. This sounded like a joke.

But when 75% of Rwanda's blood bank supplies are delivered by drones within 20 - 30 minutes, the maternal mortality rate has dropped by 51%. This system has been in operation for 9 years. Now, Zipline has completed more than 1.1 million deliveries in 9 countries, reducing carbon emissions by 84% and energy consumption by 94%.

Traditional MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) equipment weighs 2 tons and costs millions. Openwater uses infrared light technology to compress brain imaging into a credit - card - sized head - mounted device. It can detect strokes in seconds and treat brain cancer with focused ultrasound, and they have made it open - source. When the cost of diagnostic equipment drops from the million - level to the thousand - level, 8 billion people around the world will have a "top - tier hospital in their pocket".

The "toy" you see now may be the dividing line of fate in the next decade.

III. Three Biases of the Paleolithic Brain

Are Making You Reject the Future

Actually, our brains have many bugs, which will become fatal cognitive traps in the era of rapid exponential growth.

Diamandis listed several key biases in the book.

Bias 1: Negative Preference

Neurological psychologist Rick Hanson's research shows that about two - thirds of the neurons in the brain's amygdala are specifically equipped to detect negative stimuli. The brain is far more sensitive to bad news than good news.

This was a good thing in the primitive era because those who were not alert enough could not survive.

But today, this bias makes you keep scrolling through negative news every day. All you see are layoffs, collapses, wars, and AI replacing humans.

The real situation is that the global extreme poverty rate has dropped from 38% in 1990 to 10% in 2024, and the global average life expectancy has increased from 50.9 years in 1960 to 73 years in 2023.

The world is getting better, but your brain refuses to believe it.

Bias 2: Near - term Preference

The brain values recent events more and underestimates long - term trends.

You were laid off last month and thought the sky was falling. But you ignored the fact that the number of AI - related jobs has increased by 340% in the past 10 years. You saw the news of "AI replacing programmers" yesterday and wanted to change your career, but GitHub data shows that the productivity of developers using AI - assisted programming has increased by 55%.

Near - term preference makes you see the end of the world in the news but fail to see the long - term direction.

Bias 3: Status Quo Preference

Why do most people know they should learn AI and make a transformation but still don't take action?

This is not laziness. It's the brain protecting you to stay in a "familiar" environment. Our brains hate change, even if the change is beneficial to you.

In the Stone Age, leaving the territory meant the risk of death. Today, staying in the comfort zone means being left behind by the times.

How to solve this? Diamandis gave a counter - intuitive suggestion: Don't try to eliminate the biases, but recalibrate the reference frame.

Your brain will automatically compare today with yesterday, which makes you think the world hasn't changed. But what if you compare today with 10 years ago?

There was no ChatGPT 10 years ago, no AI that could write code, do design, or shoot videos, and no gene therapy that could restore vision to the blind.

All these were science fiction 10 years ago, news today, and will be common sense in 10 years.

But just changing the reference frame is not enough. The biases are just symptoms. The underlying problem is that your "mental operating system" is still an old version. The book provides a specific upgrade package.

IV. Five Mindsets + Flow Training

Reconstruct Your Mental System

This is the most practical part of the book We Are as Gods for Chinese entrepreneurs and is also the part most likely to be skipped in the interpretation.

Because "mindset" sounds like chicken soup, but what Diamandis and Kotler are talking about is not motivation but a set of trainable cognitive operating systems.

1. Five Abundance Mindsets

① Curiosity Mindset. Curiosity is our basic motivation. It is one of the basic motivations of the brain, supported by dopamine, and designed for exploration.

This spark drives us to investigate, which in turn drives insights and learning, and builds a framework for passion and purpose. Curiosity can also broaden our exploration scope, challenge assumptions, and keep our neural networks ready for exploration.

② Abundance Mindset. Replace the competition for existing resources with making the pie bigger. This is the most needed mindset shift for entrepreneurs in the exponential era.

The traditional competitive thinking believes that the market is zero - sum. Your win means my loss. But the essence of exponential technology is to turn scarcity into abundance. Sunlight is free, the cost of seawater desalination has dropped by 60%, and the labor cost of AI and robots may be 1/50 of that of humans.

When you look at the market with an abundance mindset, what you see is no longer how to grab others' shares but how to use technology to make the pie 10 times bigger.

③ Exponential Mindset. In the past, most entrepreneurs used linear thinking to evaluate technological trends, thinking, "It increased by 20% last year, so it's probably about the same this year."

But in today's world, big changes are happening every day. An ability that seems unlikely on Monday may disrupt an industry by Friday. So we need to train our brains to expect non - linear leaps rather than rely on incremental logic.

④ Longevity Mindset. If you believe that science can extend our healthy working years by 10 - 20 years and allow us to retire at 80 or 90, would you dare to enter a field that takes 10 years to succeed?

To develop a longevity mindset, you need to think and act, regarding aging as