book · 2026 · Simon & Schuster
We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance
Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s 2026 sequel to Abundance, written after the 2012 predictions became data: gene editing, artificial minds, longevity, planetary tools. The bottleneck is no longer capability. It is consciousness, meaning, and purpose. Seven takeaways they press: (1) The failure of analogy — Stone Age brains in an exponential world produce cognitive vertigo. (2) The Six Ds at warp speed — digitization, dematerialization, democratization. (3) The paradox of plenty — solving famine helped produce 2.6 billion overweight people; hyperconnectivity created mental-health crises on a 40-day cycle. (4) Become a centaur — human+AI teams beat full automation (BMW’s mixed teams rose ~85% after a robot-only crash). (5) Flow as remaining edge — AI is strong at deduction, weak at imagination. (6) The play mandate — once AI takes dull/dirty/dangerous work, play is how brains stay generative. (7) Purpose is the North Star. When survival stops being the daily fight, people do not automatically become more alive — they get comfortable, then helpless, unless meaning holds. Abundance without meaning leads to collapse. Intelligence without wisdom leads to extinction.
In a post-scarcity world, purpose is the North Star.
The new work is not about earning a living. It’s about earning a life through creation and meaning-making.
Abundance without meaning leads to collapse. Intelligence without wisdom leads to extinction.
The future won’t be built by those who fear what’s coming, but by those who know how to turn chaos into creation.
System of work lens · TVN interpretation
Centaur is the Judgment Boundary in another dialect: AI computes, humans own irreversible calls. Purpose-as-anchor is why we put individual purpose next to organizational MTP — same law, two scales. Metabolic health — Diamandis’ longevity work, and our own claim that poor metabolic health degrades the judgment that is increasing in value — is the carbon-cell half of the centaur. A firm of exhausted, inflamed, purpose-thin knowledge workers with excellent agents is not an ExO. It is abundance without meaning, with a Copilot license.