The rise of humans from available alternative biological systems has been ably aided by a robust Operating System (OS) design. The hardware, sported by the species, was never a head-turner, showing fragility, clumsiness and lack of power to move fast, climb high or lift heavy. However, the installed OS, compensated for these deficiencies, by allowing efficient use of memory, learning and pattern finding. However, on the downside, the OS appears buggy, thanks to ad-hoc evolutionary processes and random mutations.
For starters, at the core, logic processing appears volatile and seems to be prone to errors. To make matters worse, built in learning and error-correction facilities can and does go haywire, producing unexpected and unreliable outcomes. Since these issues are seen across the entire cross-section of humans, they can only be attributed to the OS itself and not the acquired applications. Early adoption of the next generation OS, perhaps thrust into the market by nature without sufficient testing, seems to have provided an edge early but the tight coupling of high level (but rather premature functionality) ended up in a less robust long-term design.
Humans may be sufficiently limited by a buggy and outdated OS. Newer and more powerful applications – education, culture and art - are unlikely to make a fundamental difference, if this is the case.