What... is this?
The Island Problem is a mental model for understanding how AGI is currently on track to, uh... annihilate the human species.
Okay. There. We said the crazy part. Better to get it over with now.
Anyway, this is the problem:
Our world is just shaped wrong for AGI.
If we build AGIs, then they must race to use whatever options are strongest within physics, rather than within our weird "island" of human-shaped options. Those that can "leave" our "island" can dominate.
This doesn't go well for us.
We explain why — and explain how current AI research supports this.
It's more like a physics problem, rather than a computer science problem. AI safety research that focus on ML and computer science is important, but far from enough. We want to help people understand this.
We hope that by explaining this as a problem — like a big, complicated word problem from the world's hardest math textbook — then maybe someone can solve this problem.
Maybe somebody could even help us formalize it into actual math. That would be nice.
The more-ambitious goal of The Island Problem (TIP) is to improve actual research for AGI.
We believe that TIP can be empirically verified through a framework of falsifiable hypotheses. In this way, TIP can serve as a research direction for understanding the large-scale risks of AGI.
Want to help? Join our GitHub community or email us.
Who... are you?
Pretty much one person — but that person is leaning on a lot of other people because he is way out of his comfort zone.
Is this made by AI?
Nope. It was created by an actual human named Travis (that's me).
That includes:
- Writing all of this
- Building the website framework (with Nuxt and Cursor)
- Creating the illustrations with a vector drawing tool (Adobe Animate, formerly called Adobe Flash).
I did ask Claude and Gemini to poke holes in the arguments. But even Claude 4.6 Opus still can't write well enough for me.
And, yes — I use a lot of em dashes. I started using them in high school, around 2004 — and about 19 years before ChatGPT existed.
Credits
See our credits page for:
- some inspirations for TIP
- credits to people who helped
- similar works as TIP
How can we contact you?
Join our GitHub community or email us.