Below, Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis share five key insights from their new book, We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance.
Steven is a journalist and the founder of the Flow Research Collective. He is also a distinguished research fellow at the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University. His co-author and good friend, Peter , is the founder of over 25 companies in the areas of AI, health-tech, space, venture capital, and education.
What’s the big idea?
Humanity is entering an age of unprecedented abundance and accelerating technological power, but our minds, institutions, and social systems haven’t adapted fast enough to handle it wisely. There is a way to resolve the mismatch and keep pace with change.
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1. The world got better while you weren’t looking.
Despite what headlines say, the world has gotten markedly better over the past two decades. Technology’s ability to meet basic human needs has shifted from debate to data. Some numbers from these last 20 years almost feel like science fiction:
- Over 200 million people have escaped extreme poverty, even with the COVID setbacks.
- More than a billion people gained access to electricity.
- Over two billion people gained access to safe drinking water.
Then there’s communications abundance. In 2012, about 2.4 billion people were online. By 2025, that number exceeded 5.5 billion. In less than a generation, three billion people joined the global conversation.
But computing probably takes the cake. In 2012, roughly a billion people owned a smartphone. By 2025, that number was over seven billion, close to 90 percent of the planet.
Consider what this means. The average 2010 smartphone contained over a million dollars’ worth of 1980s technology. That’s a phone, a camera, a computer, a GPS, an encyclopedia, and a music player. If you were to run that same calculation today, factoring in advances like processing power, camera quality, health monitoring, augmented reality, and AI assistance, then you get an exponential jump in value density worth roughly $7.1 million. If you want to measure wealth by access to capabilities rather than just income, then nearly seven billion people have become multimillionaires over the past decade.
The bigger news is that abundance compounds. Clean water doesn’t just slake thirst. It reduces disease. It improves child survival rates. It liberates women from backbreaking labor. It sparks entrepreneurship. A smartphone doesn’t just keep you in touch. It unlocks mobile banking, education, microloans, and even new markets. These forces don’t add; they multiply. So, if we’re living in a world of abundance, why doesn’t it feel that way?
2. Bad news is a business plan.
The world is not getting worse. The problem is we can’t stop believing the world is getting worse. The problem is in your brain. The call is coming from inside the house. The brain is a threat detector with a nasty storytelling habit.
For most of human history, the cost of missing danger was death. The cost of missing happiness was just less happiness—not game over. So, to help us survive, evolution made a trade-off. It hardwired us to over-index on threat. Psychologists call this negativity bias.
This means that losses feel twice as powerful as gains. It also means that negative stimuli grab our attention faster than positive stimuli, and the results are way more likely to stick in our memory. Mainstream media has learned to monetize these facts. If it bleeds, if it leads. Social media users are twice as likely to click on negative news than on positive news, according to a recent study out of Cambridge. And there are plenty of other studies.
“Social media users are twice as likely to click on negative news than on positive news.”
My favorite example comes from a 2023 paper in Nature. Researchers analyzed over a hundred thousand posts on Upworthy and found that the click-through rate rose two to three percent for every negative word contained in a headline. This is darkly hilarious because Upworthy exists to spread positive news. It didn’t matter. Evolution is a cruel master.
This real cost shows up in our daily lives. If you’re buying the bad news and living with your threat detector redlined—hypervigilance is the technical term—you’re crippling performance. Hypervigilance narrows attentional bandwidth. It lowers working memory capability. It fractures recall and attention. It wrecks creative problem-solving. Long-term thinking becomes nearly impossible. And as a bonus, you’re stressed all the time. That’s the danger of tech-fueled abundance.
The world has improved by leaps and bounds, but our ancient nervous system can’t tell. We haven’t had a software update in a couple of million years. The world is a lot better than your newsfeed claims. But if your nervous system is looking for constant threats, you’re not seeing the world as it is—you’re seeing it as it was millions of years ago. It’s a reality distortion field that taxes everything, including relationships. A little snarlier at work than usual, a little too fast to snap back at your kids…this is not a small tax.
3. Exponential leadership syndrome is the curse of the 21st century.
I want to tell you a story about you, about me, and about what happens when capable, creative people try to lead at the speed of the modern world. With our threat detection system redlined, the pressure isn’t coming from one direction; it’s coming from everywhere, all at once. And the consequences don’t show up as a single problem. They show up as a cascade.
First, we’re dealing with information overload. The brain is being bombarded by information at hyper-speed. Information overload produces cognitive overload. We can’t process much of the information. This fractures attention. Fractured attention produces decision fatigue. We don’t know what to do. Decision fatigue starts to drain meaning. Meaning drift erodes creativity, motivation, and resilience. This pushes us onto the hedonic treadmill. Eventually, we run ourselves right into burnout. Then what was dire becomes dangerous. Now we’re dealing with adaptive rigidity, performance theater, and identity collapse. That face in the mirror starts to feel like a hollow shell of our former selves.
This pattern is so consistent that it deserves a name. This is what I call exponential leadership syndrome. It’s a predictable chain of cause and effect, the direct result of the environment changing faster than our nervous system can adjust to. The core of this issue is escalating prediction error. Your brain is always trying to predict what’s about to happen next and how much energy it will require to meet that challenge.
Technically, it’s doing what it evolved to do: rely on previously successful patterns to conserve energy and reduce uncertainty. But when the rate of change in the world outpaces our ability to update those patterns, prediction error leads to prediction error leads to prediction error. And the system starts to fall apart. Attention narrows when it needs to widen, our habits harden when flexibility is required, threat responses show up disguised as strategy, and the inevitable feeling of burnout is a mismatch between our ancient biology and the mechanics of our modern world.
Many of us misread this cascade. We take it as a personal failure rather than a predictable neurobiological response. And our response to this response is equally predictable. We tend to double down on the wrong details. We’ll start optimizing our calendars instead of our cognition. We’ll chase down motivation instead of trying to rebuild meaning. And we forget all about flow. Then on the inside, we start to rot. Slowly. It’s a kind of elegant deterioration. Leaders can still lead. Sometimes they can even win. But they can’t create, explore, or adapt. Sooner or later, the whole house of cards collapses.
“You need to step sideways and get out of the race.”
You can’t solve this problem head-on. You can’t outrun acceleration. You need to step sideways and get out of the race. The shift starts with curiosity as a foundational fuel. Curiosity helps us metabolize novelty. So, in the face of uncertainty—in the face of tremendous novelty—curiosity widens attention without triggering our threat response. This reopens space for possibility. Psychologists call this adaptive flexibility.
From there, the mind needs truth-builders. These are ways to sort signals from the noise. First principles thinking is a truth-builder. Bayesian probabilities, the scientific method, the journalistic method—these are all filters. They’re not answers, but without them, curiosity breeds overwhelm. With them, uncertainty starts to act as raw material for creativity. Then creativity can turn information into insight and innovation, producing novel responses to a novel world. In a sense, it allows us to fight fire with fire.
Curiosity, through filters, leads to collaboration, which might be the killer app of the 21st century. With collaboration, we get other minds to extend our own. It’s like the last ballast in the storm: feedback, perspective, safety, resources. We need curiosity, creativity, and collaboration. This is how we keep pace in an accelerating world.
4. Discernment is a scarce resource.
Everyone is worried about AI, automation, and robots because they are systems that can think faster, learn faster, and work faster than we do. We’ve heard the echo everywhere. What happens when the machines take our jobs? It’s the wrong question. The right one is what happens when intelligence becomes abundant?
For most of time, intelligence was a scarce resource. Expertise took decades to acquire. Analysis was slow. Creativity was often constrained by time, training, and access to knowledge. This scarcity shaped our institutions, careers, and identities. That constraint is now disappearing.
Today, intelligence is becoming a utility. On-demand reasoning, design, simulation, translation, coding, research, and pattern recognition—capabilities that once belonged to experts—are moving into everyone’s hands. Abundance doesn’t just mean more resources; it means more leverage. When intelligence scales, a single person can do what once required a team.
Small groups can build what once required companies. Individuals can solve problems that previously only belonged to governments. The upside of this is enormous, but there’s a catch. Abundance doesn’t eliminate work. It eliminates low-leverage work.
In every technological transition, we see the same pattern. Tasks get automated, then workflows get automated, then all categories of effort disappear. What survives and expands is the human layer that the machines don’t supply. Meaning creativity, judgment, taste, vision, ethics, direction—in a word, discernment. In an age of abundant intelligence, discernment is the scarce resource.
The future doesn’t belong to the people who know the most. It belongs to the people who know what matters. The real challenge of exponential technology is scaling responsibility to keep pace. When power starts to scale faster than wisdom, then anxiety rises. When wisdom scales in lockstep with power, then possibility explodes. That’s the upgrade this moment needs. Not just smarter tools, but a smarter relationship with them. Sit with this question: If intelligence were unlimited, what would you choose to build?
5. Cooperation at scale is the killer act of the 21st century.
The world is far better than it looks, but there’s a dark side to abundance. With nearly six billion people online and most of them on social media, we’ve created an abundance of communication. But the results have fractured attention spans, polarized populations, and contributed to the largest mental health crisis in history. Similarly, we’ve created an abundance of energy that has unleashed an abundance of carbon. We’ve created an abundance of artificial intelligence and robotics which confronts us with real fears about an abundance of technological unemployment. This list goes on and on.
The bigger issue is that the unintended consequences of abundance are not a problem any of us can solve alone. These are global coordination problems. Solutions require working together like never before. They demand cooperation across borders, institutions, and belief systems. We need trust, compassion, and the ability to see beyond the issues that divide us.
“We’re building astonishing tools that have planet-scale capabilities, but unless we learn to cooperate like never before, abundance will collapse under its own weight.”
The last mile on the road to abundant telecommunications was the most expensive part of the network. It was that final stretch of wires required to connect individual homes to the national grid. By the middle of the 20th century, the core telecom infrastructure was in place, with switching stations, trunk lines, and national networks. The value of connection was obvious to everyone. Unfortunately, it was a logistical nightmare to run copper wiring to individual homes, especially in rural areas. It was also a big expense. Yet, until this last model problem was solved, the promise of the system remained under-realized. Today, humanity has reached an identical moment.
We’re building astonishing tools that have planet-scale capabilities, but unless we learn to cooperate like never before, abundance will collapse under its own weight. How to get people to cooperate at the scale required to solve the problems we face was a problem I wrestled with for years. Then COVID hit. And for a brief, astonishing moment, humanity did something rare. We cooperated at scale. It was amazing. Scientists shared data across borders. Information flowed freely between nations. Genome sequences went worldwide within days of their discovery. Regulators fast-tracked approvals. Supply chains were reconfigured almost overnight. And the result was the fastest vaccine development in history.
Then just as quickly as that cooperation appeared, it vanished. This taught us a critical lesson. Large-scale cooperation isn’t impossible; it’s just unstable. But for the first time in history, cooperation at scale has become a trainable capability. We not only have the technology to connect us, we also have the technology to tune up that connection.
Advances in neuroscience have enabled us to track and train the neurobiological roots of collaboration, brain entrainment, synchronization, and group flow. We have technologies that expand empathy, expand altruism, and help dissolve the boundary between self and other. Abundance has given us extraordinary power.
What it hasn’t given us is the capability to reliably act together at the scale that power now demands. This mismatch between what we can build and how well we can cooperate is the real bottleneck of the Exponential Age. Cooperation at scale is how we cross the last mile on the road to abundance.
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