Afterlife Delegation Protocol: Speculative Design of Self-Sovereign Agents that Outlive Their Principals

Abstract:Afterlife Delegation Protocol is a speculative design project that asks what death becomes when a will can act eternally. We design a speculative protocol through which a living person signs an agentic will: upon a verified death, a self-sovereign AI agent spawns on blockchain -- an immutable, resistant, decentralized, infrastructural substrate that could last forever -- endowed with the funds and memories its principal attached to it, and persists indefinitely to execute the will, overridable by no custodian. Rather than argue about this future, we stage it: following the science fiction science method, we translate the speculation into an experiential futures intervention -- a working web platform where real people design their own afterlife agents through an iterative, interactive, AI-automated interview, re-login to revise, and rehearse their will in a sandbox. Their drafted wills become qualitative data on a question rarely askable directly -- what should outlive you? -- and on how afterlife cosmologies across different cultural beliefs -- Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and atheist -- begin to drift under the pressure of AI proliferation. We design the protocol over a composition of existing Ethereum agent standards -- drafted as ERC-10001, in the normative format of an Ethereum Improvement Proposal -- and describe its three-stage lifecycle (designing the afterlife, proof of death, agent enactment), the research method, and preliminary observations from an ongoing collection. The work surfaces a poetic delegation moment between human mortality and machine eternality, mediated by long-lived infrastructures that span generations.

Computers and Society (cs.CY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2608.15405 [cs.CY]

(or arXiv:2608.15405v1 [cs.CY] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.15405 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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