World Solve

AI models built in one country are used and can cause harm worldwide, yet no institution has the mandate to set or enforce shared rules. This leaves a fast-moving technology essentially ungoverned at the international level.

Voting power at bodies like the IMF still roughly reflects the economic order from decades ago, giving less voice to countries that now represent a huge share of the world's population. This mismatch fuels distrust in the fairness of global rule-making.

New technologies have always displaced some jobs while creating others, but there's no agreed threshold for how much short-term harm is an acceptable cost of long-term progress.

A small number of large companies control a significant share of the world's seed and agricultural input supply, raising concerns about farmer dependency and pricing power. More diverse, resilient supply structures remain underdeveloped.

A meaningful share of people who contracted COVID-19 continue experiencing fatigue, brain fog, or other symptoms long after recovery, with no reliably effective treatment yet available. This remains a significant and only partially understood health burden.

Medical research benefits enormously from large shared datasets, but combining that with true patient privacy protection remains technically and legally unresolved. Better methods could unlock research without compromising individual privacy.

Shipwrecks and sunken settlements often hold historically valuable artifacts that are vulnerable to looting due to weak or inconsistent international protection. A stronger shared framework remains unbuilt.

Valuable datasets from completed research projects are sometimes lost entirely once funding and staff move on, wasting years of prior work. A shared system for preserving this data long-term remains underdeveloped.

Every major technology carries some risk of misuse or unintended harm, but there's no agreed standard for how much risk is acceptable before restricting or slowing development.

Modern technology can track location, health, and behavior far more intimately than ever before, and there's no agreed line for when this crosses from useful into invasive.

Some inequality is often seen as a natural result of differing effort or luck, but there's no agreed threshold for when it becomes unjust. Different political philosophies answer this question in fundamentally incompatible ways.

As AI boosts productivity in many industries, the resulting financial gains tend to concentrate with business owners rather than being broadly shared. A fairer distribution mechanism remains a significant unresolved economic question.

Immigration policy varies enormously between countries, with no widely accepted standard for what fairness or humane treatment actually requires. This leaves migrants' treatment largely dependent on which country they happen to reach.

Infertility affects a significant share of couples trying to conceive, and treatments like IVF don't work for everyone or every cause. A deeper understanding of underlying causes could open new, more effective treatment paths.

Rivers often flow through multiple countries, and disputes over how much water each country can use remain a persistent source of tension. A widely accepted, fair sharing framework remains unbuilt in many major river basins.

Raising cattle and other livestock produces a significant share of global methane emissions, yet meat remains a major part of diets worldwide. A lower-emission farming method that doesn't require giving up meat entirely remains unsolved.

Homes filled with gadgets from different brands often struggle to talk to each other properly, frustrating users and limiting real automation. A shared, open standard would fix this fragmentation.

The famous four-color theorem was resolved for flat maps, but generalizing the problem to more complex or higher-dimensional surfaces remains unsettled in several cases. This continues to be explored in graph theory and topology.

If moral truths exist independently of human opinion, our task is to discover them; if not, morality may be more like a shared convention. This unresolved question underlies most ethical disagreements about right and wrong.

Some ethical traditions treat honesty as an unconditional duty, while others argue truth should only be shared when it serves some positive purpose. This unresolved question complicates situations where truth offers little value beyond discomfort.