World Solve

Private companies may increasingly run water, transport, energy, communication, and housing systems with public consequences. The open problem is designing regulation that ensures reliability, accountability, and public recourse when essential services fail. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

Location-based data used by AI models can sometimes act as a proxy for race or income, indirectly leading to unfair lending or insurance decisions even without explicit discriminatory intent. Fully removing this hidden bias remains an unresolved technical and regulatory challenge.

Insurance companies increasingly use AI to assess claims, but there's limited independent, scalable auditing to ensure these systems aren't unfairly denying or delaying valid claims. Building trustworthy oversight for this remains an unresolved regulatory and technical challenge.

Opaque public tendering for large infrastructure projects frequently leads to corruption, cost overruns, and substandard public construction without digital auditing systems.

Modern supply chains are often optimized for efficiency over resilience, leaving them vulnerable when multiple regions face disruption at once. Rebalancing this trade-off remains an unresolved challenge for global trade.

Wages in many countries have grown more slowly than housing, healthcare, and food costs over the past few decades, steadily eroding real purchasing power. Reversing this trend remains a central unresolved economic challenge.

Historical mistreatment and inconsistent messaging have left some communities more distrustful of public health guidance than others, undermining response to outbreaks and vaccination campaigns. Rebuilding this trust remains a slow, unresolved process.

Public hearings and consultations are often required by law but sometimes function more as formalities than genuine two-way input processes. Making these processes truly meaningful remains an unresolved governance challenge.

Gig work can offer flexibility but often comes with unpredictable income swings that make financial planning difficult for workers. A system that offers more income stability without eliminating flexibility remains unresolved.

Farmers, especially in developing countries, often receive a small fraction of the final retail price for their crops, while large intermediaries capture most of the value. A fairer supply chain structure remains largely unresolved.

Countries rich in oil, minerals, or gas sometimes see little of that wealth reach ordinary citizens due to corruption or unfair contracts. Ensuring resource wealth translates into broad public benefit remains a persistent unsolved problem.

Infrastructure projects are sometimes chosen more for political visibility than for genuine community need, leaving real problems unaddressed. Aligning spending with actual need remains a persistent governance challenge.

People with more money can typically afford far better legal defense than those without, creating uneven outcomes within the same justice system. Equalizing access to quality legal representation remains a persistent gap in many countries.

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.

Independent journalism is being restricted or shut down in many parts of the world, cutting off citizens from reliable information about their own governments. Protecting press freedom remains an unresolved struggle in much of the world.

Develop enforceable systems that ensure indigenous peoples and local communities share in benefits from commercial use of biological resources and knowledge.

Ensure older adults, disabled people, rural residents, and undocumented groups can access benefits when governments shift from cash to digital channels.