ABSTRACT
Is there some way to forecast what the future has in store for any species, and in particular for our own? In the business world, corporate analysts and forecasters commonly resort to something popularly known as a SWOT. The four letters in this rather odd acronym stand for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. As we have said in earlier chapters, thanks to our species’ Great Human High-Five Advantage, humans excel at dumbing down the world to make the challenges we must deal with to survive and reproduce our kind as predictable and humdrum as possible. Yet what is the likelihood that the kinds of living conditions we have constructed for ourselves—when seen over the long span of evolutionary time as measured not in years but in generations—will prove to be little more than ambitious but ultimately shortsighted human folly, accomplishments that, as Shakespeare wrote, “shall dissolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind”? In this chapter, we offer a SWOT analysis for Homo sapiens building on the five elements of the Great Human High-Five Advantage discussed in Chapter 4. We contrast these five strengths with the darker side of each.
