Here are a few things that we don't know. If you are working on any of them, I'd be curious to learn more.
- What consciousness is and feels like to other entities that are not ourselves
- How the components of our brains work together to remember, generalize, learn, and act
- How to safely augment our mental capabilities
- How to create machines that can remember, generalize, learn, and act
- How we can do this safely
- How to create robots that can generalize and can act in a home
- How to best help those suffering from mental illnesses
- How to safely create powerful electronics that can remain inside the body indefinitely
- How to reverse dementia, CBT, Alzheimer's, and more
- How to reverse cancer
- How to reverse heart disease
- Why we keep getting fat and how to stop it
- The best way to reverse diabetes (and other metabolic disorders)
- The root causes of aging
- How to measure biological age
- How to model the large-scale systems of biology
- How to cheaply mass produce DNA
- We don’t know how to rearrange biological components to do useful things in a safe manner
- We don’t know how what individual biological components do at various times
- A cheap, safe, precise way of delivering drugs or other biologics
- A safer, cheaper way of developing treatments
- The best way of keeping good monopolies (those that create lots of consumer surplus early in their lifetime) and turn into rent-seeking organizations later in their lifetime
- How to accurately model large-scale social systems
- We don’t know the best way to organize and make decision at a scale of 7+ billion people
- The best way of solving the tragedy of the commons
- Climate change
- How to organize large-scale groups of people, capital, and knowledge in systems to create value
- How to correctly allocate resources to those doing research
- The best method of learning, an inefficient and difficult process and sometime unenjoyable process even for the smart and self-motivated
- The best way to motivate people to stay happy, work on interesting problems, and to contribute to society
- How to scale-up self-sustaining fusion reactions
- How to scale up generalized quantum computation
- What lies beyond our universe
- What the fundamental nature of our reality, at the lowest levels
- If the universe, at the lowest levels is continuous or discrete
- How to get a lot of people off the planet onto another planet safely
- How to get minerals and other resources from off the planet onto the planet