We Are As Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance

On April 14th, 2026, the new book by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler was released. Two days later, it arrived in my mailbox. I immediately started reading it and got hooked. Then I completed each of the three parts of the book in one day. Now it is time for me to write a review.

While I've recently written an article about the end of the world coming soon, Diamandis and Kotler provide the reader with an optimistic outlook on the future. Backed by a lot of diagrams in the appendices, they show that poverty has dramatically decreased all over the planet, access to modern technologies just as the smartphone has become nearly universal, an increasing share of the world population is living in democracies, and so on. The authors draw analogies to the Holy Scripture and Carl Jung's archetypes, maybe to target the religious American readership. They postulate that humans have gained godlike powers and write that, as Spider Man said, "with great power comes great responsibility" - in other words, we have to take care of how we use our godlike powers.

There are nine chapters in total in this book, and many of them come along with examples of projects and enterprises that make the world a better place to live. I especially found the case of a girl from Afghanistan compelling, who was not allowed to attend school under the Taliban rule and instead taught everything herself using resources from the Internet, and was eventually admitted to an American university where she is now conducting physics research. Another interesting example of how modern technology improves the life of people is the drones which are used to ship medical aid such as blood of specific blood-types to African hospitals, thus saving the lives of mothers and children.

In chapter one, the authors list a lot of future technologies, which have partly already been implemented, and compare them to miracles from the Bible. This list includes synthetic biology, 3D printing of organs, generative artificial intelligence, genetically modified crops, gene therapy, stem cell therapy, epigenetic reprogramming, AI-powered drug discovery, cryonics, augmented-reality systems, brain-computer interfaces, and many things more.

Part two of the book commences with a history of artificial intelligence from the 1950s to modern times. While the book is of an optimistic spirit all in all, there is also a chapter about the dark sides of future technology, such as potential abuses by terrorists.

Part three concludes with advice on how to survive the transition from scarcity to abundance, which mainly deals with the attitude to things. It is spiced with analogies from neuroscience.

The book has a total of about 260 pages and is very well legible. I enjoyed reading it a lot and recommend it to anybody interested in future technology.

Claus D. Volko 

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