Conceptual Statement

Terror management theory suggests that people buffer the anxiety of mortality by situating themselves within larger structures of meaning—religion, lineage, legacy, family, nation, culture, humanity. Our cosmological beliefs about time shape how we understand continuity, responsibility, and survival—shaping not only how we live, but ultimately how civilizations endure. In the age of agentic AI and decentralized computation, these cosmologies of time may be shifting again.

What if autonomous agents can act beyond the lifespan of their human originators, and decentralized compute infrastructures can preserve execution across time and outlive the person.

Afterlife Protocol is a speculative design work that explores this poetic transit moment between mortal individual life and almost-indefinite infrastructural time. The project speculates a proposed Ethereum standard, ERC-10001, through which a person can enter into agreements with dedicated, self-sovereign AI agents operating on decentralized blockchain infrastructure. Unlike a traditional will—which depends on lawyers, trustees, family members, and legal institutions for execution—this agentic will becomes an autonomous posthumous actor: a form of temporal infrastructure capable of carrying your will across generations. Its self-sovereignty ensures it can pay for its own compute and cannot be intervened upon by any third party.

Because AI agents can act with general-purpose autonomy, they open a vast design space for the afterlife. Each person can decide what is worth preserving and design far more than one might imagine with this agentic will: an identity to be remembered by; a griefbot of living memory to comfort loved ones; a knowledge system that can continue to contribute; fortunes that can keep growing; a project that may take centuries to unfold; or a dynamic, evolving "ghost" that carries your persona and continues to act in society.

We will conduct this project using the Science Fiction Science research method, treating speculative future design as an experimental instrument for studying present-day social attitudes before these technologies become fully real. Through a large-scale online platform based on Afterlife Protocol, we will examine public imaginative intuitions about AI and afterlife ethics:

As a mortal being, what do you believe should outlive you? What should infrastructure carry forward after death, if an agentic AI can steward your will? And if an autonomous agent can guard a belief forever, does that belief become another form of life?

Through these questions, we want to expose how every afterlife protocol carries a cosmology of time. We expect the inquiry itself to serve as a provocation, prompting people's reflection on how their meaning of life and cosmologies of time may shift under the pressure of AI. We also hope the results will reveal a diverse spectrum of "Long Now" imaginaries, helping to inform possible futures for human civilization.