This is a fairly common take, but it is wrong in my opinion. I've worked on some fairly difficult engineering problems (related to signal processing) and one of the remarkable things is that multiple people in the room usually have a workable idea about how to approach it. And if you think about the really productive periods of science the number of scientists was very limited. There's no shortage of smart people who want to work on interesting problems.

What there is a shortage of are people with the organizational, and other, less tangible, skills that are needed to bring complex projects to fruition. At a high level, we know things that work for most of the list that Perell provided (energy, education, housing, healthcare, and transportation) and even assuming zero technological progress they could be hugely improved with existing technology, but someone has to figure out how to break the status quo and reach a new equilibrium.

Definitely those are important problems, but just being smart won't solve them. They already attract lots of smart people. You need to bring something else to the table to make progress.