We're at an interesting point in human history. Our tiny ape-brains are adapted to our evolutionary environment (the African savannah and the primordial forests of Eurasia) but we've accidentally created a totally different world through our astonishing technologies. Unfortunately our brains are utterly mis-matched and can't cope with the challenges of a complex inter-connected world in which our follies are amplified by those technologies. Furthermore our present system of governance (representative democracy) is probably the worst-possible approach to dealing with the many challenges we face, as it rewards simple-minded sound bites promulgated by cynical and incompetent candidates and punishes any attempt to inject reason and facts into the conversation. Furthermore, the vast majority of voters are wholly ignorant of essential knowledge and too intellectually indolent (or too cognitively limited) to acquire greater knowledge. So we have the uninformed and simple-minded voting for the cynical and incompetent. No high-minded notions of reform will alter this fundamental problem and it seems unlikely we will abandon our current broken approach to governance. Thus the future looks extremely bleak.