World Problems
Ranked by priority score. Click any problem to explore research, review community drafts, and contribute your own.
Global Health & Disease
Preventable diseases kill millions annually. Malaria, tuberculosis, and neglected tropical diseases disproportionately affect the global poor despite cost-effective interventions existing.
Engineered Pandemics & Bioweapons
Advances in synthetic biology lower the barrier to creating novel pathogens. A deliberately engineered pandemic could kill hundreds of millions and destabilize civilization.
Factory Farming & Animal Welfare
Over 80 billion land animals are raised in factory farms annually under conditions of severe suffering. Alternative proteins and welfare reforms offer tractable near-term interventions.
Catastrophic AI Misuse
AI systems used deliberately by state or non-state actors for mass casualties via cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, autonomous weapons, or supercharged bioweapon design.
Power-Seeking AI Systems
Advanced AI systems may develop instrumental goals around self-preservation and resource acquisition, undermining human oversight and potentially leading to irreversible loss of control.
Wild Animal Suffering
The majority of sentient life on Earth consists of wild animals who face suffering from predation, disease, starvation, and parasitism. Interventions exist but remain highly controversial.
Moral Status of Digital Minds
As AI and emulated minds grow in sophistication, the question of whether they deserve moral consideration becomes pressing. Failure to recognize digital sentience could be an enormous moral catastrophe.
S-Risks (Suffering Risks)
Scenarios where the long-run future contains vast amounts of suffering rather than flourishing — including scenarios with digital minds in negative hedonic states, or stable dystopias locked in by powerful AI.
Extreme Power Concentration via AI
AI could enable unprecedented concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a small group — a corporation, government, or individual — foreclosing pluralistic futures.
Gradual AI-Driven Disempowerment
Rather than a sudden takeover, humans may gradually cede decision-making to AI systems in ways that are individually rational but collectively undermine human agency and democratic governance.
AI-Enhanced Decision Making Failures
AI systems advising or making high-stakes decisions in healthcare, criminal justice, and infrastructure may encode biases, fail catastrophically on distribution shift, or be misused by bad actors.
Great Power Conflict
Military competition between major powers, especially around AI and nuclear weapons, raises the risk of catastrophic war. AI-accelerated decision cycles and autonomous weapons lower the threshold for escalation.
Climate Change & Ecological Collapse
Climate change poses serious risks to billions through extreme weather, sea level rise, agricultural disruption, and ecosystem collapse. While well-studied, implementation of solutions remains critically underfunded.
Space Governance & Long-Run Futures
As humanity expands into space, governance frameworks for resource extraction, colonization, and conflict resolution are being established now. Early decisions may lock in structures for millennia.
Extreme Poverty & Economic Inequality
Over 700 million people survive on less than $2.15 per day, facing chronic malnutrition, exclusion from healthcare, and intergenerational poverty traps. Evidence-backed cash transfers and economic empowerment programs have proven highly cost-effective.
Global Hunger & Food Security
Nearly 750 million people face severe food insecurity, and 3.1 billion cannot afford a nutritious diet. Hunger and malnutrition impair cognitive development, immune function, and economic productivity on a massive scale.
Clean Water & Sanitation
2.2 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water, and 3.5 billion lack safe sanitation. Contaminated water and poor sanitation cause 1.4 million preventable deaths annually, primarily from diarrheal disease in young children.
Mental Health Crisis
Mental health disorders are the leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting 970 million people. Depression and anxiety alone cost the global economy $1 trillion annually in lost productivity, yet mental health receives less than 2% of health budgets.
Nuclear Weapons & Disarmament
The world's ~12,500 nuclear warheads pose an existential threat to civilization. A large exchange between major powers could trigger nuclear winter, kill hundreds of millions directly, and collapse global food systems for years.
Biodiversity Loss & Ecosystem Collapse
Species are going extinct 1,000× faster than background rates due to habitat destruction, pollution, invasive species, and climate change. Ecosystem collapse threatens agricultural stability, water systems, and the natural systems that support all life.
Forced Displacement & Refugee Crisis
Over 120 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes by conflict, persecution, and climate change — the highest number in recorded history. Displaced populations face acute vulnerability to violence, disease, statelessness, and intergenerational poverty.