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.
Mark C. Ballandies, Florian Spychiger, Uwe Serdült +1cs.MA cs.AI cs.CY econ.GN
We propose DAO-enabled decentralized physical AI (DePAI), a democratic architecture for coordinating humans and autonomous machines in the operation and governance of physical-digital systems. We (1) synthesize foundations in blockchains, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and cryptoeconomics; (2) connect DAO design with digital-democracy research on deliberation and voting, showing how each can advance the other; (3) position DAO-governed decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) within a vertically integrated stack that links energy and sensing to connectivity, storage/compute, models, and robots; (4) show how these elements specify workflows that couple machine execution with human oversight, enabling enhanced self-organization of techno-socio-economic systems, which we call DePAI; and (5) analyze risks, including security, centralization, incentive failure, legal exposure, and the crowding-out of intrinsic motivation, and argue for value-sensitive design and continuously adaptive governance. DePAI offers a path to scalable, resilient self-organization that integrates physical infrastructure, AI, and community ownership under transparent rules, on-chain incentives, and permissionless participation, aiming to preserve human autonomy.