What... is this?

The Island Problem is a better mental model for understanding how AGI is currently on track to annihilate the human species. lol

We want to replace the "Paperclip Maximizer" with something more realistic.

The basic idea is that our world is just shaped wrong for AGI. It's more like a physics problem, rather than a computer science problem.

We hope that by structuring it 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 they are still pretty bad at writing. Can't use them for writing, even if I wanted.

And, yes, I use a lot of em dashes — but 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.