The Miracles You’re Living Through (And Don’t Even Notice)
Peter Diamandis is a co-founder of the X-Prize and Singularity University. He regularly publishes a newsletter and can be found on Substack. I receive regular email blasts from Peter. When what follows appeared in my inbox this week, I was immediately compelled to share it with readers. I have edited the material to condense it before sharing it. Many will be inspired. Some may find the God references for whatever faith you practice unsettling.
Peter has written the book Abundance, which I have referenced upon occasion on this blog. His new book, co-authored with Steven Kotler, is entitled We Are As Gods – A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance.
Peter and Kotler argue that humanity today has godlike technological powers, such as artificial intelligence (AI), gene editing, and advances in longevity. They describe what they call the Paradise Paradox, where material plenty is leading to a psychological strain on our species and a streak of denialism.
The content that follows comes from the book.
The Blind Can Now See
A man walks into a hospital, legally blind. Eighty minutes later, he walks out able to see faces. That’s not science fiction. That’s not a hundred years from now. That’s Monday morning in 2026. (Editor’s Note: You can read some background on the technology behind this amazing breakthrough as previously published on this blog.)
His name doesn’t matter. What matters is what happened inside that operating room. A surgeon implanted a two-millimetre photovoltaic microchip containing 400 light-powered pixels into his retina. The chip—called PRIMA—works like a solar panel, converting infrared light into electrical signals that stimulate surviving neurons. Those neurons transmit signals along the optic nerve to the visual cortex, where the brain constructs them into images. The surgery took 80 minutes. What were the results? Biblical.
Before the procedure, this man’s vision measured 20/450: legally blind by U.S. standards. And after? 20/160. The difference between seeing darkness and seeing faces. Between isolation and connection. Between blindness and sight. This would be a biblical miracle in the past. So what does that make us?
“We Are As Gods and Might as Well Get Good at It”
The above words appear in Stewart Brand’s 1968 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. What Brand is talking about is advancements in technology.
What would it actually take to match the gods?
Creatio ex nihilo means creation of something from nothing. That feat has been reserved for supreme deities alone. In the Old Testament, Yahweh pulled it off. In the New, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and turned water into wine. Joining these two are Brahma, Atum, Pangu and more. These deities had abilities to create light, land, and life from the void.
Omniscience, the ability to know all things, and omnipresence, to exist everywhere at once, are equally the realm of the gods. Gods had praecognitio, the Latin word for the power to foretell the future, shape shift, resurrect the dead, heal the sick, and control the weather. Humans have acquired or are acquiring these abilities today.
If you count the miracles in the Old Testament alone, there are 83 supernatural acts divided into ten categories: Creation, Provision, Nature, Healing, Resurrection, Judgment, Protection, Prophecy, Communication, and Victory in Battle. That’s a lot of miracles.
In 1968, when Brand made his statement, we weren’t even close yet. Instead, we were taking our first baby steps. We were gods in training, playing with room-sized mainframe computers, inventing the first microchip, creating colour TV, a neat trick, and sending three men around the Moon. We were a year away from Neil Armstrong’s small step. We were not gods, but what nobody expected was that we were very fast learners.
Comparing Biblical Miracles To Human Accomplishments
If you measure modern technology against the Old Testament’s miracle categories, here’s what you might find:
1. CREATION MIRACLES
Synthetic biology creates new forms of life or modifies existing ones. CRISPR edits genes with precision. 3D printing brings matter into being layer by layer, building something from almost nothing. Generative AI creates virtual worlds populated by self-directed agents capable of forming economies, religions, and societies. We create life. We create worlds. We create intelligence.
2. PROVISION MIRACLES
Vertical farming produces food with 95% less water and 99% less land. Desalination turns seawater into fresh. Lab-grown meat provides protein without slaughter. Solar power harvests energy from the Sun to deliver sustenance even in the desert. Drones deliver meals and medicine where supply chains fail. We have mastered the miracle of provision, feeding the multitudes and turning scarcity into abundance.
3. HEALING MIRACLES
Gene therapy cures disease at the genetic level. Stem cells repair what injury destroys. Telemedicine enables remote diagnosis and treatment. Advanced diagnostics detect disease before symptoms appear, often catching seven out of ten causes of death early enough to intervene. AI-powered drug discovery accelerates cures for cancer and rare genetic disorders. The blind see. The paralyzed walk. The dying are healed.
4. RESURRECTION MIRACLES
Cryonics preserves the dead in the hope of reviving them in the future. Stem cells create new organs. Organ perfusion technology keeps donated organs viable for days. CPR and defibrillators revive people in cardiac arrest. We raise the dead. Maybe not permanently. Not yet. But we’re getting there.
In 1968, when Stewart Brand made his proclamation, these capabilities were a fantasy. Today, they’re infrastructure. Miracles have become utilities. We are, therefore, by any reasonable definition, gods.
Why We Don’t Feel Divine
So, if we’re literally walking the Earth in an age of miracles, why don’t we feel like gods? The answer lies in how our brains process novelty, or more accurately, fail to process it.
In the 1980s, Northwestern University cognitive scientist Dedre Gentner ran experiments asking people questions like: “How is a solar system like an atom?” Most people answered: “Electrons orbit the nucleus like planets orbit the sun.” Gentner discovered something profound about how the mind works: a process she called structure-mapping.
To understand the unfamiliar, humans don’t just make surface comparisons. We map deep relational similarities between domains. We use analogies as cognitive infrastructure, for example, the brain to the computer, the internet to a web, genes to code, and the Universe to a network.
Analogy is how we compress novelty into familiarity. It’s how we make sense of the world when it starts changing faster than we can keep up. But here’s the problem. Our comparison machinery is running out of comparisons.
Godlike powers in our pockets? What’s the analogy? Curing blindness with microchips? Resurrecting the dead with defibrillators? Creating life from stem cells?
There are no easy analogies for comparison. Without them, it is harder to parse the world. The result is a state of cognitive vertigo, the sense that the world is moving faster than we can make sense of it.
And when analogies fail, humans start hunting for deeper patterns. It is what Carl Jung called archetypes.
The Rise of Archetypal Media
Jung argued that archetypes are universal patterns embedded in humanity’s collective unconscious, primal symbols that evoke powerful reactions across cultures. The Hero. The Shadow. The Great Mother. The Wise Old Man.
In the early 21st century, we are awash in Jungian archetypes. If you want to track the psychological impact of technological acceleration, the failure of analogy, count the gods, goddesses, superheroes, and supervillains that populate our screens. In the 1970s, we got Superman. That was followed by Wonder Woman, Spiderman, Batman and the panoply of Marvel characters. The 1980s saw ten superhero films and six TV shows. The 1990s had twenty major films and nearly as many shows. Between 2000 and 2010, the number tripled to sixty films and thirty TV series.
Jung would argue this surge is an unconscious response to the psychic destabilization brought on by radical acceleration in human potential. With each technological leap, we need new symbols and myths to anchor our understanding of our growing power.
Archetypes provide narrative coherence and moral clarity. As Spider-Man says, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Today, we live in a world of abundant archetypes because we live in a world of abundant miracles.
The Information Apocalypse
There’s another reason we don’t feel divine: information overload.
In 3000 BCE, if you measured all the data in the world contained on papyrus scrolls, clay tablets, the works, it totalled about one gigabyte, equal to 4,000 books. In 2012, when my book Abundance was published, the world produced 2.8 zettabytes of data. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. That’s 4,000 trillion books. By 2025, the number grew to 181 zettabytes.
We don’t have an analogy for that number. It’s too big for our imagination and hard on the human nervous system. Today, we are living through the biggest information surge in history. The result is a mismatch between the data storm outside and the prediction engine inside. Our ancient brains don’t have the bandwidth, and our imagination has been hijacked by the apocalypse. No wonder we don’t feel divine.
The Miracle in Your Pocket
Let’s bring this home. You carry miracle technology in the smartphone tucked in your jeans and handbags. You can summon a chariot of the gods disguised as an Uber with a finger tap. You can conjure a feast via Uber Eats with another. You have answers to nearly every question in seconds. This is omniscience on demand.
You can see anyone, anywhere, anytime through video calls. Omnipresence is now a feature. Translation. Navigation. Simulation. Creation. Communication. It’s all at your fingertips. The grandiosity of omnipresence and omniscience has been replaced by the prosaic Zoom and Google, but the underlying superpowers are the same.
These divine powers are everywhere and everywhen.
In 2012, we predicted a future that included autonomous cars, flying cars, delivery drones, and humanoid robots. It sounded like science fiction.
Today? Over 30 autonomous car companies are operational. Waymo operates robotaxis with zero safety drivers in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. Tesla Full Self-Driving has over one million users.
Flying car companies—eVTOL vehicles—are conducting commercial test flights in Dubai, Los Angeles, and Singapore. Joby Aviation expects to launch commercial operations offering 15-minute flights from LAX to downtown LA (versus 60-90 minutes by car).
Nearly every major retailer has robots running in their warehouses. Zipline makes thousands of drone deliveries every day, transporting lifesaving medicines and saving tens of thousands of lives in the process.
Humanoid robots? Google Tesla Optimus. You’ll find videos of robots folding clothing, serving drinks, and holding yoga poses.
We’ve gone from hard-to-believe stories to commercial operations in just over a decade.
A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance
Here’s the thing: Stewart Brand was right. We are as gods. But he left out the hard part. We have to get good at it. Because the same exponential forces that gave us godlike powers are also overwhelming our nervous systems, hijacking our attention, and triggering cascades of bias that blind us to miracles. Our capabilities have far outstripped our wisdom.
That’s the paradox. We have the power to cure blindness, create life, and command machines with our thoughts. But we’re still running Stone Age prediction software in our heads. Our ancient brains don’t have the bandwidth to process miracles at scale. So we feel anxious instead of abundant. Overwhelmed instead of empowered. Burned out instead of divine.
The solution isn’t less power. It’s a consciousness upgrade. Without upgrading our consciousness to match our godlike capabilities, we’ll miss it entirely. We’ll keep doomscrolling through the apocalypse, blind to the fact that we’re living through the most extraordinary transformation in human history.
The Choice
You have a choice. You can keep seeing the world through the lens of negativity bias, confirmation bias, and cognitive overload, where every headline is a disaster and every change feels like a threat.
Or you can update your operating system. You can learn to see the miracles you’re living through. You can train your brain to recognize abundance even when it’s wrapped in disruption.
You can, in Stewart Brand’s words, get good at being gods. The tools are here. The data is clear. The miracles are multiplying. The only question is: Will you see them?
