I may have more to say later, but let me start by just throwing out this quote from Psychologist Daniel Gilbert:

The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That's what brains did for several hundred million years -- and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.

Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain's most stunning innovations, and we wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.

UPDATE:

Commenter Triticale asks:

Hey, I've done beta testing before. Where do I download a copy to try?

Triticale is being too hard on himself. He, like all the rest of the human race, is already beta-testing a neocortex. That is the problem with this theory. There probably isn't a sizable control group of people with lessor developed or greater developed neocortices. So it would be hard to test whether our inability to accurately predict long-term risk is something that could be improved upon, or whether we are facing a limit on biological computation.

Acknowledging this major problem with proof, I have my own neocortex theory. Perhaps the conflict between the amygdala and the neocortex can explain why we humans enjoy rollercoasters and horror movies. Of course neither activity is really dangerous. Intellectually we know that even a hypercoaster like Superman: The Escape is safe, but we feel a sense of accomplishment when we overcome the primitive amygdala to get on the ride.