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BY Jude Cramer

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Humans have long been obsessed with what happens to people stranded on desert islands. From Robinson Crusoe to Lord of the Flies and Yellowjackets , stories about resilience, creativity, and chaos in the wilderness have always fascinated audiences.

But what if those humans were replaced by an AI castaway? What happens when AI agents aren’t given any task at all, except to exist and fill their time on a digital desert island?

Those are the questions that researchers at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) sought to answer in a study released earlier this month. When left to their own devices on a desert island, the AI agents didn’t sit idly by, nor did they wander aimlessly.…