World Solve

For decades, computer chips got faster mainly by shrinking transistors, but they're now near the smallest physically possible size. Finding a new way to keep computing power growing is an open engineering problem.

Modern software is built from thousands of smaller components, any of which could be secretly tampered with. Without full traceability, a single compromised piece can quietly infect software used by millions.

Even the best robots struggle with uneven terrain, sudden obstacles, or tasks requiring fine motor control that animals handle instinctively. Closing this gap would open up robotics for disaster response, farming, and elder care.

When an AI makes a harmful decision, it's often unclear whether the blame falls on the developer, the user, or the company deploying it. Without clear rules, victims of AI mistakes often have no clear path to accountability.

Hard drives fail, file formats become unreadable, and even cloud storage depends on companies staying in business. Without a truly long-lasting storage method, much of today's digital history may simply vanish.

Hospitals, power plants, and water systems increasingly run on connected computer systems that can be targeted remotely. A serious attack on any of these could cause harm far beyond the digital world.

Fake videos and voice clones are now realistic enough to fool most people, and detection tools often lag behind the technology creating them. Left unresolved, this threatens trust in video and audio evidence itself.

As AI moves from answering questions to taking real actions, like managing money or controlling machinery, mistakes carry real consequences. We still lack agreed safety standards for how much autonomy is safe to hand over.

Training today's largest AI models can consume as much electricity as thousands of homes use in a year. Without more efficient methods, AI's environmental cost will keep climbing alongside its capabilities.

Billions of people still lack reliable, affordable internet, cutting them off from education, healthcare information, and economic opportunity. Closing this gap remains a matter of infrastructure cost, not lack of demand.

Old phones, laptops, and batteries pile up in landfills, leaking toxic materials while valuable metals inside go to waste. A cheap, safe recycling process could turn a growing pollution problem into a resource stream.

Despite decades of research, battery capacity has improved far more slowly than the power demands of our devices. A real breakthrough here would change how we use and design nearly all portable technology.

Nearly every major hack traces back to a bug that existed long before anyone found it. Catching these flaws before release, rather than after damage is done, remains an unsolved challenge.

AI can now produce convincing text, images, and video in seconds, and detection tools are struggling to keep up. Without a reliable way to tell real from fake, public trust in what we see online keeps eroding.

Once powerful enough quantum computers exist, they may crack the encryption that currently protects banking, health records, and private communication. Most of the internet still isn't ready for that shift.

Modern AI models are often accurate but operate like black boxes, even to the people who built them. Without a way to explain their reasoning, it's hard to trust them in medicine, law, or other high-stakes decisions.

Current searches scan a tiny fraction of the sky and only for a narrow range of signals. Without better tools, we may be missing evidence of other intelligent life simply because we aren't looking in the right way.

Current detectors cost billions of dollars and can only catch the largest cosmic collisions. A cheaper detection method would let us study the universe's most violent events far more often.

Hurricanes and tornadoes can still shift path or intensity with little warning, leaving communities scrambling to evacuate. More precise, longer-range forecasting could save lives and billions in property damage every year.

Neuroscience can map which brain regions activate during thought, but nobody can explain why that activity produces subjective experience at all. This gap separates our understanding of the brain from any real understanding of the mind.