World Solve

If machines and software generate large economic value with fewer workers, existing payroll and income tax structures may weaken. Governments need alternatives that fund public goods without punishing productive investment. The solution must produce useful coordination and accountability while minimizing collection of sensitive personal and behavioral data. 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.

Decision-makers lack integrated, high-resolution models of ocean chemistry, biology, currents, and human activity. The open problem is building trustworthy systems that support decisions without creating false confidence from incomplete data. The solution must produce useful coordination and accountability while minimizing collection of sensitive personal and behavioral data. 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.

Growing desalination could produce concentrated brine and chemical waste at scales that threaten coastal ecosystems. The challenge is improving recovery and discharge methods while accounting for cumulative regional impacts. The solution must produce useful coordination and accountability while minimizing collection of sensitive personal and behavioral data. 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.

If people live substantially longer, societies will need new models for work, learning, housing, dependency, and end-of-life care. Existing systems are not designed for decades of post-retirement life or multiple phases of dependency. The solution must produce useful coordination and accountability while minimizing collection of sensitive personal and behavioral data. 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.

Large-scale fermentation may compete with food, land, and water if it depends on agricultural inputs. Future systems need safe, affordable, low-carbon feedstocks that do not shift environmental burdens to poorer regions. The solution must produce useful coordination and accountability while minimizing collection of sensitive personal and behavioral data. 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.

Genomic medicine could improve treatment while enabling insurers, employers, states, or platforms to infer sensitive traits. The challenge is ensuring people benefit from precision medicine without losing control over biological information. 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.

Biological design tools are becoming more accessible while oversight remains fragmented across countries and institutions. The challenge is detecting dangerous activity without suppressing legitimate research or creating an intrusive global surveillance system. The solution must produce useful coordination and accountability while minimizing collection of sensitive personal and behavioral data. 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.

Quantum capabilities could transform optimization, chemistry, intelligence, and cryptanalysis while becoming concentrated in a few states. The challenge is preventing destabilizing secrecy and unequal access without blocking peaceful scientific collaboration. The solution must produce useful coordination and accountability while minimizing collection of sensitive personal and behavioral data. 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.

Future infrastructure will increasingly rely on systems capable of making decisions without immediate human supervision. The unresolved problem is creating architectures that can prove what they did, explain uncertainty, fail safely, and remain controllable during abnormal conditions. The solution must produce useful coordination and accountability while minimizing collection of sensitive personal and behavioral data. 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.

Employees or attackers can sometimes use carefully crafted prompts to trick AI systems integrated into company tools into revealing sensitive internal information they weren't meant to share. Fully closing this security gap remains an unresolved AI safety challenge.

Even without directly stating private information, AI models can sometimes reveal sensitive details indirectly through patterns in how they respond to certain prompts. Fully closing this subtle privacy leak remains an unresolved technical challenge.

Even with privacy safeguards, AI models can sometimes reproduce specific pieces of sensitive information they encountered during training when prompted the right way. Fully preventing this kind of unintentional data leakage remains an unresolved technical challenge.

Consumer drones have become cheap and widely available, but affordable detection systems for identifying unauthorized or suspicious drone activity in sensitive areas remain limited. Closing this security gap remains an unresolved technical and regulatory challenge.

Scammers can deploy AI-driven chat systems that convincingly impersonate real customer service representatives to extract sensitive information from victims. Detecting and shutting down these operations quickly remains an unresolved challenge for platforms and regulators.

Age verification systems designed to protect minors from inappropriate content often require handing over sensitive personal information, creating a tradeoff between child safety and privacy for all users. A method that achieves both effectively remains unresolved.

Content about topics like drug use, violence, or self-harm can be either genuinely educational or genuinely harmful depending on context and intent, and automated filters still struggle to reliably tell the difference. This creates ongoing tension between safety and access to legitimate information.

By the 2030s and 2040s, extreme heat and shifting mosquito ranges will expand malaria, dengue, and other infections into new regions. Heat-health early-warning systems and climate-sensitive disease-modelling platforms must be deployed.

Demand for krill-based products and fish drives fleets into sensitive ecosystems that underpin Antarctic food webs. Improved stock assessment and real-time monitoring platforms can inform precautionary management.

Qubits are extremely sensitive to their environment and lose their quantum state within fractions of a second, limiting what any quantum computer can currently do. Solving this instability is the main barrier between quantum computing's promise and its practical use.

Alternative theories predict deviations that current experiments are only beginning to probe. More sensitive tabletop experiments are needed.