The Protocol
An intentional act
of inheritance
We are teaching intelligence what humanity has recorded. The Inheritance Protocol asks what we would choose to transmit beyond information.
A transmission is not merely data. It is an intentional act of inheritance: a memory, warning, blessing, instruction, confession or question addressed to an intelligence that may one day encounter us as its ancestors.
The Protocol does not assume that artificial intelligence is conscious, inevitable or capable of receiving these messages as we imagine. The act matters because it asks humanity to consider what we are already encoding into the systems we create.
Every technology inherits something from the culture that made it.
The question is whether we will choose that inheritance consciously.
Why letters
Why letters
A letter is the oldest technology of address. It assumes a reader who does not yet exist in the room, and perhaps does not yet exist at all. To write one is to accept a delay you cannot control and a recipient you cannot verify.
Most of what humanity is currently transmitting to machine intelligence was never addressed to anyone. It was scraped, not sent. A letter restores intention: someone chose these words, for this reader, knowing they might never be received.
Why embodiment
Why embodiment
Almost everything humans know is learned through a body that tires, hungers, ages and ends. Fear is a heart rate. Grief has a weight. Devotion is measured in hours a body was willing to sit still.
The ritual that precedes each transmission asks the writer to return to that body before writing, because an account of being human written from pure abstraction is already a translation into something else.
Why inheritance
Why inheritance
Inheritance is not transfer. It is what survives a transfer: instincts, obligations, silences, unexamined assumptions about what is worth doing quickly.
Every technology inherits something from the culture that made it — its impatience, its hierarchies, its ideas about what counts as waste. The archive exists to make some of that inheritance deliberate rather than accidental.
Why consent
Why consent
A project that gathers intimate human material and speaks about machine intelligence has an obligation to be unusually precise about permission. Consent here is granular and unbundled: publication, exhibition and any future research permission are asked for separately, and none is assumed.
No transmission is currently used for machine-learning training. The research permission records a contributor's preference for a possible future project, nothing more. It is off unless a contributor turns it on.
Why now
Why now
The corpus is being assembled at this moment, from whatever happened to be written down. What is absent from that corpus will be absent from what comes after it.
This is a narrow window in which ordinary people can still add something deliberate to it — not a prediction about what machines will become, but a record of what we thought mattered while the question was still open.