Why This Book Is Recommended by Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and Altman Jointly?

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", showing a blue planet slowly rising above the gray lunar surface.

After seeing this photo, Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, said, "We are as gods and we might as well get good at it." This means that humanity has the ability to change the course of this planet and has the responsibility to learn to use this ability well.

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

Let's briefly introduce these two authors.

Peter Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of Singularity University and the founder of the X Prize Foundation. He has successively established X Prizes 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 was also named one of "The World's 50 Greatest Leaders" by Fortune magazine in 2014 and one of "America's 250 Greatest Innovators" by Forbes in 2026. He has accurately predicted the trends 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 are available in more than 130 countries around the world. He is often on the front lines of Silicon Valley, NASA, and the X Prize Summit, closely following the global technological frontier.

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

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 about in the era of singularity.

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

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

We 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 part of our daily lives.

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." Instead, you'll only think, "Why is my phone out of battery again?"

It's not your fault. It's your brain at work. 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, recency bias, and loss aversion.

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

Since the 1956 Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in the United States, AI technology has been developing for 70 years, but the brain has not been updated even once. This is the most troublesome thing in the AI era: The cognitive hardware cannot keep up with the times.

II. The 6D Framework:

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

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

Any exponential technology will go through six stages from its birth to world - changing.

1. Digitization

For example, cameras have become phone cameras, records have become MP3s, and maps have become GPS signals. Once digitized, it rides on the express train 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 exponential curve grows extremely slowly in the early stage, and the change is almost invisible to the naked eye until it crosses the inflection point.

For example, Kodak's engineers 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 obsolescence of film cameras. By the time this trend really emerged, Kodak was on the verge of bankruptcy.

3. Disruption

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 phones still had the largest market share in the world. But six years later, in 2013, Nokia sold its mobile phone business 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 realize it, 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, recorders, navigation devices, calculators, flashlights, alarm clocks, and maps. Now they are all free on your 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. Massification, 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 didn't even dare to 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 massification: When something that was only accessible to a few people becomes accessible to everyone, power will be dispersed from the hands of a few, and new entrepreneurial opportunities will emerge in this gap.

The book contains several case studies, each of which is a living example 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 were delivered by drones within 20 - 30 minutes, the maternal mortality rate 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 your 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 can become fatal cognitive traps in the era of rapid exponential growth.

Diamandis listed several key biases in the book.

Bias 1: Negativity Bias

The neuropsychologist Rick Hanson's research shows that about two - thirds of the neurons in the brain's amygdala are dedicated to detecting 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, market crashes, wars, and AI replacing humans.

The real situation is: 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: Recency Bias

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

You were laid off last month and thought the world was ending. 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 careers, but GitHub data shows that the productivity of developers using AI - assisted programming has increased by 55%.

Recency bias makes you see the end of the world in the news but miss the long - term direction.

Bias 3: Status Quo Bias

Why do most people know they should learn AI and make a transformation but still do nothing?

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

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

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

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?

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

Ten years ago, all these were science fiction. Today, they are news. In 10 years, they will be common knowledge.

But just changing the frame of reference 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

Rebuild 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 a cliche, but what Diamandis and Kotler are talking about is not just motivation. It's a trainable cognitive operating system.

1. Five Abundance Mindsets

① Curiosity Mindset. Curiosity is our basic driving force. 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 scope of exploration, challenge assumptions, and keep our neural networks ready for exploration.

② Abundance Mindset. Replace the competition for existing resources with expanding the market. This is the most necessary mindset shift for entrepreneurs in the exponential era.

The traditional competitive thinking believes that the market is a zero - sum game. Your win means my loss. However, 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, you no longer think about how to grab others' shares but how to use technology to expand the market by 10 times.

③ Exponential Mindset. In the past, most entrepreneurs used linear thinking to evaluate technological trends, thinking, "It increased by 20% last year, so it will probably be 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 cultivate a longevity mindset, you need to think and act, regarding aging as a process that can be