World Solve

direct democracy tools remaining weak remains one of the most urgent challenges of our time. Systems currently in place are inadequate for the scale and complexity of the problem. A successful approach must work where resources are scarcest and demonstrate clear, measurable results. It should identify possible harms, respect local agency, and show how the solution can be maintained and expanded by the communities it is meant to serve.

Future progress on human development and planetary health depends on solving tool libraries remaining few. Conventional approaches have proven insufficient. The required intervention must integrate community knowledge, data and appropriate technology while remaining affordable, privacy-preserving and operable with minimal external support. Strong solutions will articulate measurable impact metrics, risk mitigation strategies, and a plan for sustained operation by local actors after the pilot phase.

Reflective surfaces that display a socially anticipated face rather than the actual one undermine personal identity and body autonomy. The problem is ensuring that basic self-viewing tools remain accurate and private rather than consensus-driven.

The ability to permanently remove selected people from one’s sensory field can protect against harm but also enable complete social erasure and polarisation. The challenge is setting limits and accountability so that muting remains a last resort rather than a default social tool.

Cities may deploy scent systems that automatically adjust collective emotional states. Over time some residents develop tolerance or adverse reactions, creating uneven effects and new forms of environmental inequality. The problem is designing transparent, opt-outable, and medically safe atmospheric interventions that do not become tools of coercion or social control.

As digital navigation layers become permanent fixtures in daily life, physical landmarks lose meaning and people lose the ability to orient themselves without screens. The challenge is creating systems or practices that preserve spatial awareness and independent wayfinding while still allowing beneficial digital tools. Solutions must work across cultures, age groups, and infrastructure levels, avoid creating new dependencies, and remain usable when networks fail.

Predictive policing can reinforce historical bias even when built from apparently neutral data. The open problem is designing standards that make public safety tools testable, reviewable, and defeasible when they cause harm. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

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.

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 design must remain functional when standards, trade routes, data access, and diplomatic cooperation are unreliable. 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 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.

Border systems may increasingly use risk scoring, biometric checks, and predictive screening. The unresolved problem is ensuring security tools do not become opaque instruments of arbitrary exclusion or rights violations. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

Future AI systems may improve software, research workflows, and model-training pipelines faster than institutions can review them. The open problem is designing international oversight that supports beneficial progress while preventing uncontrolled capability escalation. 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.

Future governments may depend on private firms for cloud services, AI tools, digital identity, and critical infrastructure software. The unresolved problem is designing procurement rules that preserve interoperability, portability, and long-term public control. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

Future states will need identity systems that work for migrants, displaced people, informal workers, and citizens missing formal paperwork. The challenge is building identity infrastructure that expands access without becoming a surveillance or exclusion tool. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

The technical problem is coupled with a social allocation problem: production varies, meters may be imperfect, and residents need rules they trust. Tariff design, optimization, and transparent settlement tools could make shared generation investable. The opportunity is intentionally human-scale: a cooperative, clinic, workshop, school, or municipal team could pilot it within one locality and measure outcomes before expanding. Mathematical modeling can help with forecast uncertainty, incentives, or resource constraints; entrepreneurship can turn a reliable workflow into a viable service.

Businesses seeking to cut corners could potentially use AI to generate fabricated but convincing compliance records for regulatory audits, and auditors don't always have the tools to catch increasingly sophisticated fake documentation. Strengthening audit verification remains an unresolved challenge.

Old photographs and videos can be digitally altered using AI in ways that are difficult to distinguish from genuine historical restoration, risking the distortion of the historical record. Forensic tools for detecting this kind of manipulation remain underdeveloped.

AI tutoring tools can sometimes confidently present incorrect explanations that students may not have the expertise to catch themselves. Ensuring consistent accuracy in AI-driven educational content remains an unresolved quality control challenge.

Automated scraping tools can collect publicly visible personal data from social media profiles far faster and more comprehensively than manual methods ever could, often for uses the original poster never intended. Meaningful technical or legal limits on this practice remain inconsistent.

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.