"We are as gods and we might as well get good at it!"
After reading this book, what I remember is not the half-sentence "We Are as Gods"—a declaration full of force—but the second half omitted by the Chinese title: We are as gods and we might as well get good at it. More than the excitement of "our having gained godlike power," I think the word "learning" in the second half to use it well to wield this power" is what comes closer to the future.
The Impact of a New Book on the Shelf, and the Anxiety of Incompleteness
This newly released book We Are as Gods has a visually striking cover, with four bold characters pressing down on the subtitle "Reconstructing, in the AI Age, our survivability and competence"—a subtitle that feels like a question thrown directly at the present. Opening it, I was curious: as AI iterates faster and faster, new tools and new capabilities keep refreshing our understanding, and the sense of uncertainty grows heavier, what survival methods suited to this era does the book discuss? Having read it, I feel the Chinese title, for promotional reasons, only took the first half of the whole sentence. The original line is from Stewart Brand: We are as gods and we might as well get good at it. The first half is the reality now unfolding; the second half is the true thematic center of the book. Rather than lingering in awe of "possessing godlike power," "learning"to use it well to wield this power" is the question more worth pausing to consider. Humanity's bewilderment before new technology is not a first. When the steam engine pushed open the door to the industrial age, when the automobile replaced the horse-drawn carriage, when the nuclear bomb tore open the prologue of the atomic age, humanity went through similar disorientation. When a force far beyond the old cognitive framework suddenly breaks into life, all past experience fails, and uncertainty surges from every direction—this is the most instinctive response. And every time a technological wave finally settles, it is never through rejection or deification, but through our step-by-step deepening understanding of the technology, feeling out its boundaries, establishing corresponding rules, and slowly finding the rhythm of human-technology symbiosis.
The Growth of Technology Follows Its Own Inherent Laws
This AI wave is special only in its faster iteration and broader penetration. In just a few years it has rapidly seeped into every corner of work and life, leaving us almost no buffer period to adapt slowly. It is as if, in an extremely short time, we suddenly took hold of a capability far beyond our existing cognition, and before we could think through how to use it, we were already swept forward. I think this is the root of most people's AI anxiety. Our brains evolved in a linear survival environment and are accustomed to steady, predictable change; whereas exponential technologies like AI and biotechnology follow a doubling growth path. The speed of cognitive evolution cannot keep up with the speed of capability expansion, and the old mental framework cannot contain the new boundaries of capability—this sense of dislocation is the underlying source of most people's confusion and panic before new technology. Furthermore, on the predictability of technological development, the book proposes the 6D framework of exponential technology evolution—from digitization, deception, and disruption to demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization—by which any new technology, from prototype to widespread adoption, follows a clear path. It moves from a novelty touched by a few, gradually becoming a universally beneficial basic capability, and finally costs keep falling until it reaches universal coverage. The AI popularization we are experiencing today is only one stage along this complete path; once we understand the pattern, much unknown panic turns into predictable change. The book does not blindly peddle technological optimism; it devotes ample space to "the dark side of abundance": it lists ten real-world risks such as the climate crisis, microplastic invasion, new forms of wealth inequality, and dopamine-addiction design, and uses the "Universe 25 experiment" to raise a more essential question—when technology helps us solve the scarcity of survival, when both material goods and information move toward total abundance, how should humans situate their own sense of meaning? Technology can solve the problem of "what is lacking," but it can never answer the question of "what to do."
The Subject That Wields This Capability Is Not Only the Individual
The response path the book offers focuses mainly on the individual level: adjust linear thinking, learn human-machine collaboration, enhance focus and creativity, and capture the dividends of technology through cognitive upgrading. These are very instructive for each individual adapting to the times, but I think that in a real industrial environment, the direction of AI capability deployment and the making of technical rules rest ultimately in the hands of organizations. The R&D direction of advanced models, the commercial design of scenarios, and the goal alignment of products are all, in the end, organizational decisions. No matter how much an individual upgrades their cognition, they can only decide how they themselves use the tools; it is the organization's choices that determine what shape the tools themselves are molded into, what goals they align with, and what boundaries they uphold. Many problems brought by technology are not essentially due to insufficient individual cognition, but to deviations in the organization's goal orientation. From this perspective, embracing this rapidly expanding godlike capability is not only a required course for every individual, but a required question for every organization.
What Matters More Than Whether We Can Use It Is What We Use It For
What is more worth pondering than "whether we can master technology and use tools" is what we use technology to do. Technology itself is a neutral lever with no built-in direction. When we use it as a tool for emotional counseling, to help more people solve concrete pain points, it amplifies goodwill a hundred- or thousandfold; when we use it to profit from information asymmetries, to design schemes that amplify desire, it equally amplifies speculation and short-sightedness. The wider the boundary of capability, the heavier the weight of each choice. Looking back at the survival logic of the industrial age, efficiency and competition were the long-term leitmotif. Much of the time we are not innately indifferent to sincerity and goodwill; rather, under the squeeze of survival priorities, we temporarily put away our soft true selves, growing used to trading tricks for results and efficiency for gains. It is not that human nature changed, but that the context of survival obscured more essential pursuits. And as AI gradually frees us from tedious, repetitive subsistence tasks, we actually gain more leeway to rediscover the authenticity that survival had concealed. This is probably also the deeper meaning of those two characters, "to use it well to use it well": not merely about mastering technology skillfully and raising production efficiency, but about choosing the right direction for technology—using this powerful capability to create real value and convey sincere warmth. "We Are as Gods" is the coordinate of capability this era gives us, telling us what we are coming to possess; while "using it well" is the value anchor we set for ourselves, reminding us what to hold onto. Technology will keep running forward, and our capability boundaries will keep widening. But what determines how steadily and how far we go was never how powerful the technology is, but what kind of foundation we uphold. Capability is always a tool; the human is the ultimate end. Now that we possess power far beyond anything before, we must hold onto the human heart.
