---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
---
We’ve spent much of the last 10+ years trying to answer a simple question: what are the world’s biggest and most neglected problems?

We wanted to have a positive impact with our careers, and so we set out to discover where our efforts would be most effective.

Our analysis suggests that choosing the right problem could increase your impact by over 100 times, which would make it the most important driver of your impact.

Here, we give a summary of what we’ve learned. Read on to hear why ending diarrhoea might save as many lives as world peace, why artificial intelligence might be an even bigger deal, and what to do in your own career to make the most urgent changes happen.

In short, the most pressing problems are those where people can have the greatest impact by working on them. As we explained in the previous article, this means problems that are not only big, but also neglected and solvable. The more neglected and solvable, the further extra effort will go. And this means they’re not the problems that first come to mind.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world-problems/

Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.

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