We are as Gods Concepts

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

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 13 Apr 2026 · 225pp · 76,418 words

used to solve the world’s greatest inequities.” —Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft What the world’s greatest technologists and thought leaders are saying about We Are as Gods… “We Are as Gods is the critical reading for the coming Artificial General Intelligence and Singularity. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler show that while exponential technologies deliver the capability

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Singularity University, and author of The Singularity Is Nearer “Diamandis and Kotler’s bestseller Abundance helped shift the global conversation from fear to possibility. Now, We Are as Gods reveals that the forces they predicted—AI, clean energy, digital biology—are scaling at a pace few could imagine. This book argues persuasively that the

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capabilities responsibly and ambitiously. A timely and important follow-on to a landmark work.” —Eric Schmidt, PhD, former CEO of Google, CEO of Relativity Space “We Are as Gods is a guidebook for the age when human intelligence becomes networked with machine intelligence. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler show us how exponential technologies—AI

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to create abundance, purpose, and true agency in your life. If you’re ready to stop feeling overwhelmed and start taking control of your future, We Are as Gods is your guide for mastering an abundant future—and maximizing your impact now.” —Tony Robbins, the world’s #1 life and business strategist and four

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-time New York Times bestselling author “In We Are as Gods, Peter and Steven capture the same spirit that drives every XPRIZE: the belief that humanity’s greatest challenges are solvable. This book is a powerful

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more, but better. Diamandis and Kotler push us to build a future of shared prosperity, where abundance is measured by justice, creativity, and human potential. We Are as Gods is the conversation our times demand.” —Van Jones, CNN host, founder of DreamMachine.org, and New York Times bestselling author of Rebuild the Dream “An

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extraordinary blueprint for hope. We Are as Gods—both exhilarating and grounding—shows how exponential technologies can serve our deepest human values. This book acts as an invitation and a practical guide at

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my hand on this adventure PART 1 WARP SPEED This is magic. Sure—but not necessarily fantasy. —THOMAS PYNCHON CHAPTER ONE TheogonyI A Tall Order “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it,” wrote Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand in 1968. He was talking about technology. It was

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dropping in price on a regular basis is an exponential technology. Moore’s law is the standard example. In 1965, three years before Brand’s “we are as gods” pronouncement, Gordon Moore caught sight of a similar trend. He noticed the number of integrated circuits on a computer chip had been doubling every eighteen

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safeguard civilization. And the clock is ticking. So, how to create the future we want before it’s too late? This is the focus of We Are as Gods. It’s a blueprint for thriving in an accelerated era: a deep examination of where we are now, where we’re going, and what to

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.” Thriving in a world of abundance demands it. Coda The Last Night This book opened with Stewart Brand’s maxim for an age of maximization: We are as gods and we might as well get good at it. It’s a good line. A call to arms for an age of abundance. But we

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send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. NOTES PART 1 Chapter 1: Theogony “We are as gods”: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968. It first appeared on the title page of the Whole Earth Catalog’s inaugural issue, published in

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

by Jacob Siegel · 24 Mar 2026 · 348pp · 103,246 words

the abundance of information and the new technologies to share it stripped away all limits on human potential. His motto appeared in the first issue: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” The progress of the 1960s saw formerly pathbreaking ideas about informational control adopted across all segments of

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

by John Markoff · 22 Mar 2022 · 573pp · 142,376 words

directly aided by man to save the species—the ultimate existential act. A decade later Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog would begin with the premise “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” The next evening Brand went to see the Gregory Peck movie Pork Chop Hill, about a fierce

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. The contributor’s fee was ten dollars for about two hundred words plus a byline. It was all tied together by Brand’s introductory sentence: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” (In a second printing of the first edition it was edited to read “get good at it

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of technology and tools to improve the quality of human life. It showed a consistency that stretched back to the opening sentence of the Catalog: “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” However, his thinking on the ideal of self-sufficiency that had helped inspire the back-to-the

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been irrational, anti-scientific and very harmful,” he asserted, also bashing Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth for their opposition to GMO foods in Africa. “We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it,” he concluded. Almost four decades after Earth Day, this was a new Stewart Brand. John Brockman had chosen

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Whole Earth Catalog four decades earlier. In the fall of 1968, he had set out by arguing, “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” Whole Earth Discipline opened with his new epigraph: “We are as Gods and HAVE to get good at it,” underscoring his belief in the existential threat of climate change

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, one of those who had partied with Brand at the Trips Festival more than half a century earlier, stood at the microphone and challenged his “We are as gods” hypothesis. “Idiot savants,” Coyote proposed instead. “We’re highly developed, we have these great skills, this technological cleverness, which is completely untethered to wisdom. My

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are an example of efforts to save entire species. The project would complete the arc defined by the opening sentence in the Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” At the age of seventy-three Brand set out to make good on his original promise, orchestrating

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used to gain more than linear leverage in a positive direction. However, there is an important difference between the “We are as gods and better get good at it” in the 1968 Catalog and the “We are as gods and have to get good at it” in Whole Earth Discipline four decades later. In the preface to the

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was what Brand told a group of students at the Parsons School of Design on the first Earth Day in 1970: “When we realize that we are as gods, then we will know that we have to assume a god’s responsibilities, and that we are able to. Many good things are very simple

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and by making their research materials available. Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado of Structure Films shared research materials with me while they prepared a documentary, We Are as Gods, about Brand’s life. While doing interviews, research, and writing, I had the benefit of a number of thoughtful friends and colleagues including Adam Fisher

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Magazine, October 30, 1994 “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” —San Francisco, March 1966 “We are as Gods and we might as well get used to it.” “We are as Gods and we might as well get good at it.” —First and second printings of the first Whole Earth Catalog, October 1968

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, Go Back and Start Over. Drop out of specialization. Develop rudimentary skills good for any situation.” —“Stay Loose,” Earth, December 1971 “When we realize that we are as gods, then we will know that we have to assume a god’s responsibilities, and that we are able to. Many good things are very simple

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sentence: We rolled our own cigarettes.” —Journal, May 21, 2004 “The most proficient knot is one that can be easily untied.” —Journal, September 6, 2005 “We are as gods and we HAVE to get good at it.” —Epigraph to Whole Earth Discipline, where Brand endorses nuclear power and GMO foods, 2009 “Living on a

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, September 16, 1984, 16. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14 Yale Joel, “Psychedelic Art,” Life, September 9, 1966, 19. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15 Kate Daloz, We Are as Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America (New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2016), 92. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

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, 213 relentless curiosity of, 2, 6, 17, 37, 91, 290, 301, 323 as role model and symbol, 3, 188–89 vertigo episodes of, 337–38 “We are as gods” hypothesis of, 2, 39, 165, 232, 294, 347–48, 358, 360, 361–62, 364 see also specific projects and publications Brand family: Higgins Lake camp

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celebration of, 236–37 toll on SB of, 174, 183–84, 185, 189, 192–93 transformative impact on readers of, 173, 189, 198, 253–54 “We are as gods” hypothesis of, 2, 39, 165, 232, 294, 347–48, 358, 360, 361–62, 364 Whole Earth Catalog supplements, 169–70, 177, 180, 182, 191, 218

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

by Jennifer Burns · 18 Oct 2009 · 495pp · 144,101 words

than regulation, as solutions to the environmental crisis. The survivalist Whole Earth Catalog, a hippy-techno-geek bible, was an important node of this movement. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” the catalogue announced, striking a vaguely libertarian note with its intention to support “a realm of intimate

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

by Timothy Ferriss · 6 Dec 2016 · 669pp · 210,153 words

money.” Sethi, Ramit: “‘Tell me a secret you’ve never told anyone. I’ll keep it confidential. Email me: ramit.sethi@iwillteachyoutoberich.com.’” Silva, Jason: “‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’—Stewart Brand” Sivers, Derek: “Well, my real answer, if I was taking that literally, is that I

The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon · 1 Jan 2002 · 445pp · 129,068 words

pursue every hint of a cure of conditions we have or acquire… I don’t know that. Only if it doesn’t interfere with who we are as God’s children, I suppose. And some things are beyond human power to cure, so we must do the best we can to cope with them

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher · 9 Jul 2018 · 611pp · 188,732 words

. On the other hand, if somebody like Alan Kay couldn’t make it happen, how can I make it happen? BOOK TWO THE HACKER ETHIC We are as gods and might as well get good at it. —STEWART BRAND What Information Wants Heroes of the computer revolution By the mideighties, the technologists who were

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller

by Alec Nevala-Lee · 1 Aug 2022 · 864pp · 222,565 words

fifty subscribers, he sold tens of thousands by the end of the following year. The book’s tone was set by its famous opening sentence: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” Brand began with two pages on Fuller, whose technological philosophy influenced the emphasis that the Catalog placed

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Catalog, 439. “Techniques and tools”: Ibid. “I dunno, Whole Earth Catalog”: Ibid. “with manufacturers”: Stewart Brand to RBF, April 10, 1968, quoted in Wong, 454. “We are as gods”: Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 3. “access to tools”: John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (New York: Penguin, 2022

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

by Will Storr · 14 Jun 2017 · 431pp · 129,071 words

was blocks from Engelbart’s lab. Open the cover of this esoteric bazaar of products and philosophies and you’d see its mission statement. Declaring ‘we are as gods and might as well get good at it’, it hailed a future in which ‘a realm of intimate, personal power is developing – power of the

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans

by Mark Lynas · 3 Oct 2011 · 369pp · 98,776 words

to manage it intelligently and so save it from ourselves. Perhaps the environmentalist and futurist Stewart Brand put it best when he wrote these words: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.”5 Amen to that. THE DESCENT OF MAN Listening to some environmentalists talk, it is easy to get