Repository of problems worth solving
World Solve is a public institutional repository for identifying real unresolved problems across science, society, health, governance, economics, and local systems. Each entry is intended to be citable, inspectable, and actionable.
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4194Open
0Solved
9Humans
Future challenges such as AI, climate engineering, cyber conflict, and biotechnology cross borders but may be governed by incompatible national rules. The open problem is creating minimum safety floors without requiring complete political agreement. The solution must work with limited capital, intermittent services, and local maintenance capacity. The research opportunity is to define measurable success criteria, test the approach in realistic settings, identify failure modes, and create a pathway from prototype to accountable deployment.
technology-computing
coordination
countries
reject
shared
standards
low-income
communities
future
such
climate-environment
economics-resources
society-governance
systems
infrastructure
quantum
science-space
safe
open
United States, North America
AI systems trained on globally diverse data may encode incompatible assumptions about fairness, authority, family, privacy, and acceptable risk. The challenge is creating pluralistic evaluation methods that protect universal rights without imposing one culture's values as a universal standard. The solution must work with limited capital, intermittent services, and local maintenance capacity. The research opportunity is to define measurable success criteria, test the approach in realistic settings, identify failure modes, and create a pathway from prototype to accountable deployment.
economics-resources
north-america
united-states
evaluation
systems
alignment
cultures
political
low-income
communities
universal
trained
globally
technology-computing
climate-environment
society-governance
quantum
infrastructure
open
Global / Unspecified, Global
General relativity governs massive scale gravity while quantum mechanics governs atomic scales, but they break down together at black hole singularities. Developing a unified Theory of Quantum Gravity is the holy grail of theoretical physics.
science-space
global-unspecified
quantum
mechanics
general
relativity
theories
remain
fundamentally
incompatible
governs
gravity
technology-computing
mathematics-logic
whether
philosophy-ethics
know
haven
open
Global / Unspecified, Global
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.
economics-resources
global-unspecified
answer
inequality
don
have
shared
economic
fair
society
tolerate
some
philosophy-ethics
whether
resolved
determine
know
haven
open
Global / Unspecified, Global
Competitive and cooperative instincts can pull people in opposite directions, and it's unclear whether a person or system can genuinely embody both without one undermining the other. This unresolved tension appears throughout economics, sports, and interpersonal relationships.
economics-resources
global-unspecified
whether
haven
figured
out
possible
justify
treating
certain
forms
competitiveness
philosophy-ethics
resolved
know
mathematics-logic
determine
ethical
Infectious disease outbreaks near Vietnam's borders are frequently delayed in detection because neighboring health ministries use incompatible reporting systems and lack a shared, real-time data-sharing agreement.
health-biology
asia
vietnam
infectious-disease
coordinating
cross-border
outbreak
response
protocols
around
infectious
disease
outbreaks
systems
cross
society-governance
border
health