How the Protocol Institute is Adopting AI

The Protocol Institute is building itself around AI adoption, using bots like C3PO and Humboldt to handle research discovery and organizational tasks rather than traditional human-led infrastructure. The organization's approach treats AI tool proliferation as a generative process, allowing practical patterns to emerge through experimentation rather than top-down design.

Related resources

Talk

Building Psychohistory: An Infrastructure Field Report

Aneesh Sathe presents an infrastructure field report on 'World Machines Theory,' a framework for reading history as the interaction of long-cycle civilizational 'machines' (Modernity, Divergence, Liveness), and demonstrates the two systems built to operationalize it: the Oracle, a multi-agent RAG pipeline over a shared knowledge lake that generates oracular 'prophecies,' and the Prime Radiant, a typed knowledge graph of ~500 historical 'machine cards' that can be simulated forward to project future institutional ecologies. He frames this as an Asimov-inspired but decentralized, commons-based reimagining of psychohistory, contrasting it with Seldon's mathematical, control-oriented original. The talk opens with context from the Contraptions Book Club, introduced by its host.

machine-cards oracle-rag-knowledge-lake organizations

Sep 2026

Aneesh Sathe

Talk

Guest Talk with Evan Miyazono | Putting Protocols into Practice

Evan Miyazono, head of research at Protocol Labs, walks through his mechanism-design approach to protocols—mapping rules to strategies to outcomes—using Filecoin's proof-of-replication and the late addition of Filecoin Plus (a trust layer to prevent 'useless bit' storage attacks) as a case study. He then surveys Protocol Labs' public-goods funding experiments (hypercerts, retroactive funding, the S-process for preference aggregation, Funding the Commons conferences) and closes with speculative thoughts on open agency architecture for AI alignment as a future protocol challenge.

filecoin-plus-trust-layer filecoin-proof-of-replication guest-talks

Jun 2023

Evan Miyazono

Article

2026 Protocol Symposium: New Nature

The 2026 Protocol Symposium, the third edition of the flagship event for protocol studies, will be held online September 21-25 with the theme 'New Nature,' exploring the technological layer shaped by AI and protocols. Abstract submissions for talks and workshops are open until June 14, 2026, with registration to follow once the schedule is finalized.

obliquities organizations protocols

Jun 2026

Venkatesh Rao