World Solve

Even devices marketed for outdoor visibility can become difficult to read in direct sunlight, limiting usability during many common outdoor activities. A fully effective, affordable anti-glare solution remains elusive.

Advanced prosthetics with sensory feedback exist but remain far too expensive for widespread use, especially in lower-income regions where basic prosthetics are already hard to access. Closing this affordability gap remains an unresolved global health technology challenge.

Modern hearing aids remain prohibitively expensive for a large share of the global population that could benefit from them, leaving hearing loss untreated in many communities. Making this technology genuinely affordable at scale remains unresolved.

Solar panel efficiency has improved significantly, but in regions with less sunlight or higher installation costs, achieving full cost competitiveness with traditional energy remains inconsistent. Closing this gap universally remains an unresolved technical and economic challenge.

Illegal wildlife trade pushes species toward extinction while operating largely undetected across international borders. A more coordinated global tracking system could catch this trade before, not after, populations collapse.

The deep ocean holds vast mineral resources and ecosystems we barely understand, yet no single country has authority over most of it. Without a fair governance system, the deep sea risks being exploited before it's even properly studied.

Many real-world problems, like planning delivery routes or scheduling, become exponentially harder to solve exactly as they grow in size. Faster methods for these problems could save enormous time and resources across industries.

Many real-world systems, from weather to economics, are described by nonlinear equations that resist neat, general solutions. Better methods here would improve prediction across nearly every scientific field.

As AI systems increasingly influence what billions of people see, believe, and decide, someone is effectively choosing the values baked into those systems. There's no agreed process for who that someone should be, or how they should be held accountable.

Some countries and individuals consume vastly more resources than others, and there's no broadly accepted definition of what a fair share would even look like. This makes global cooperation on resource use difficult to justify to everyone involved.

Poorer countries often struggle with currency instability that makes trade, debt repayment, and planning far harder than for wealthier nations with stronger currencies. A more stable, fairer international monetary system remains unbuilt.

When automation replaces jobs, the resulting profits mostly go to business owners and shareholders, not the workers who lost their income. A fairer system for sharing these gains remains an unsolved economic and political question.

Because clean air and water aren't priced like other resources, they're often used or polluted without any real cost attached until the damage is severe. A better way to account for their true value could change how we protect them.

A single disruption, like a factory closure or a blocked shipping route, can ripple through global supply chains and cause shortages far from the original problem. Building more resilient systems remains a major unsolved challenge.

Millions of people now earn a living through app-based gig work without the healthcare, sick leave, or retirement benefits traditional jobs offer. Extending fair protections to this growing workforce remains largely unresolved.

Companies often move production to wherever labor is cheapest, making it hard for any single country to guarantee fair wages without losing jobs to competitors elsewhere. A coordinated approach across countries remains unresolved.

As automation and AI displace routine and increasingly cognitive labor, most economies still assume most people need traditional jobs to survive and find purpose. Without a credible alternative, mass automation risks instability rather than shared benefit.

As more countries and private companies plan to mine the Moon and asteroids, there's still no clear, agreed system for who owns what. Without this, space could repeat the same resource conflicts we've had on Earth.

Many large-scale policies are implemented based on assumptions rather than solid evidence, and by the time results come in, the damage or waste is already done. Better testing methods could save enormous public resources.

Sustainable aviation fuel and electric planes exist in early forms but remain far more expensive than traditional jet fuel. Making clean flying both effective and affordable is still an open engineering and economic problem.