An Open Letter from a Former Senior Chinese Judge to President Trump and to All Leaders and Elites of Humanity

After Putting a Safety Lock on SI, Should We Put Another Safety Lock on the Human Mode of Thought?

— What Humanity Faces May Not Be Merely a Technological Turning Point, but a “Singularity Upgrade” That Will Decide the Life or Death of Civilization

（This letter was sent to the relevant U.S. government email address on October 1, 2026; the accompanying message provided President Trump with a brief further explanation regarding the reasons for writing this open letter. I earnestly hope that political elites from all nations—and indeed elites from all sectors of humanity—will carefully examine this text. Due to my personal limitations, this open letter is the only means available for me to convey the information I have received concerning the life-and-death future of humanity; I therefore hope that everyone will do their utmost to translate and disseminate it.）

Dear President Trump,

Greetings.

My pen name is Jin Guyu. I am an ordinary man living in China, approaching seventy years of age. I spent several decades working as a judge and once held the rank of Senior Judge.

In March 2025, I felt it necessary to draft, for the first time, Letter to Everyone in the World (1): After Trump Lifts the Veil from Our Institutions, May Humanity Seek the Truth of Civilization and Work Together to Build Comprehensive and Lasting Peace.

I wrote that letter because I believe that, after humanity entered modern civilization, those who worked hard to “lay the tablecloth of civilization” often failed to recognize why hypocrisy remained concealed beneath that tablecloth, or how it could truly be removed.

For that reason, I believe that after humanity passes through the turmoil and shocks that history may inevitably bring today, people may one day thank you for using your candid nature to pull away some of the coverings of hypocrisy in modern civilization, forcing humanity to recognize that we must once again search for the fundamental truth of civilization and the direction in which our efforts should go.

Today, I take the liberty of writing to you again because, on September 29, 2026, you once again did something that I believe carries exceptional symbolic significance and reflects a consensus already emerging among leading human institutions and technological elites.

You formally proposed using the term Super Intelligence (SI) to describe the rapidly developing technology of artificial intelligence, and together with leaders of several of the world’s foremost technology companies, advanced new measures for SI safety.

Whatever people may think of those specific measures, they demonstrate at least one thing:

The governments and companies most capable of advancing SI are becoming increasingly aware that the greater the capability, the more necessary it is to establish safety boundaries.

I strongly support putting safety locks on SI.

But the question I truly wish to raise with you today is:

After putting a safety lock on SI, must humanity go one level higher and put a safety lock on the human mode of thought that will use SI?

Through observing and reflecting on the history of human civilization, I have gradually arrived at a key understanding.

If we look at the world from the perspective that the common essence underlying all phenomena in the universe is that the movement of universal energy generates processes, which then form combinations of processes and patterns of cooperation, then the human mode of thought is, in effect, the “organ” that produces human consciousness and ideas.

In my understanding, beyond the information gathered by our five senses, it is a sixth crucial “organ for perceiving the world” that humanity has not yet adequately recognized.

Humanity’s direct animal impulses arise primarily from the five senses, while all the capacities that allow human beings to transcend direct sensory perception and create civilization arise from this “sixth organ” — the human mode of thought.

The greatest difference between this “sixth organ” and the five senses, in my view, is that its biological function of existence and development operates according to principles of openness and work consistent with the law of negative entropy.

Therefore, the extent to which this organ, in its open and work-performing operation, accords with the law of negative entropy determines the distinction between animality and humanity, and also shapes the historical development of civilization.

Accordingly, I am increasingly concerned that:

what ultimately determines where SI takes humanity may not simply be whether SI itself is safe,

but rather:

Who is using SI?

With what mode of thought is it being used?

Through what procedures do relationships arise?

And what kind of structure of human social cooperation do those relationships ultimately form?

I. If There Were a Platform Where I Could Safely Finish What I Have to Say, I Would Like to Explain One Extremely Ordinary Thing to All Humanity

I would first like to ask for your attention, and through this open letter tell the world:

If someone could provide me with a platform on which I could speak calmly, continuously, and truthfully, without worrying that speaking itself might bring danger to me or my family,

I would be willing to explain everything I have been thinking about for more than twenty years.

I would not begin with a grand theory.

I would begin with concrete examples that anyone can understand.

I would explain why a person can take something that could have been done well and end up doing it badly;

why an organization in which everyone says they want to do a good job can still end up with a result that satisfies no one;

why an institution can look excellent in written form, yet operate completely differently in reality;

why people who clearly know the truth may eventually find themselves able to speak only falsehoods or empty words;

why a country may continually increase its power in the name of security, yet become increasingly insecure;

and why, although humanity says it desires peace, it continues to produce ever more powerful capabilities for war.

Human beings have long been accustomed to attributing specific harmful outcomes to the mistakes of a particular power group, certain individuals, or a particular leader.

But in my understanding, at a deeper level these outcomes may actually be the inevitable result of the combined effect of everyone’s modes of thought.

And this result is connected with humanity’s historically inevitable path of cognition: beginning with appearances and gradually attempting to penetrate toward the essence of the world.

Now, this path of exploring the world “from the outside inward” may have reached a singularity at which a fundamental change of direction has become necessary.

Therefore, what I ultimately wish to tell humanity is actually only an extremely ordinary understanding — one from which no human being has ever been separated, and from which no one can ever be separated — and the cognitive turning point that follows from it:

Humanity has long understood the world before us primarily as a “world composed of matter, entities, and outcomes,” but this may not be the fundamental truth of how the world unfolds.

Our eyes see objects.

Our ears hear sounds.

Our bodies touch physical entities.

So human beings naturally pursue:

what we can possess;

what we can obtain;

what we can control;

what we can establish;

what we can occupy;

what we can win.

We very easily assume:

“Once we have it, things will work out.”

If we have wealth, we will be happy;

if we have institutions, we will be civilized;

if we have power, we can make things work;

if we have technology, we will progress;

if we have stronger SI, we will have a better future.

But the conclusion I have reached after more than twenty years of reflection is exactly the opposite:

It is not that “once we have something, things will work out”; rather, “only when things work in the right order can we truly have them.”

Something can arise, exist, and endure

not because it first stands there as a “thing,”

but because the elements that constitute it enter into relationships according to certain procedures,

form a structure,

and through dynamic feedback maintain a stable and sustainable pattern of combination.

Only then do we finally perceive and recognize that stable pattern as a “thing.”

So I condense my core understanding into this:

Procedure → Relationship → Structure → Dynamic Feedback → System Properties and Outcomes

If this direction is basically correct,

then perhaps humanity has long placed too much weight on one end of causation.

We continually pursue visible entities and outcomes,

while overlooking the invisible factor that may actually determine how those entities and outcomes can arise, exist, and endure:

Procedure.

I believe this is the primary originating factor in the actual universe and the first element that human beings must identify when pursuing the realization of value.

For that reason, it is also the most fundamental foundation for making human value judgment precise.

II. I Believe the Emergence of SI Is Not Merely Another New Technology

I know that what follows is an extremely bold proposition.

It is not a conclusion already established by science.

It is a personal understanding I have developed from the perspective of natural philosophy.

I am willing to put it before the public so that scientists, philosophers, and all humanity can criticize and test it.

In my view:

The emergence of SI may be the first singularity-like demonstration, before all humanity, of how much energetic tension procedure can generate — revealing the laws by which civilization unfolds according to the fundamental truth of the universe.

The chips are still matter.

Electricity is still energy.

Information still ultimately depends on physical carriers.

Yet when algorithms, data, computing power, feedback, networks, and various procedural relationships are combined in entirely new ways,

forms of intelligence that almost no one previously imagined suddenly appear.

This itself seems to be showing humanity that:

What determines what capabilities a system can ultimately display may not merely be “what things it possesses,” but how those things form relationships and structures through procedure.

For this reason, I do not regard SI simply as a new tool.

I see it as something that has suddenly appeared before human civilization as a:

Singularity-like demonstration.

It seems to be forcing humanity to answer a question:

Will you continue to understand the world only from the perspective of “matter, entities, possession, and outcomes,” or will you begin to understand it from the perspective of “how procedures form relationships, structures, and unfolding results”?

III. Humanity Is Therefore Facing, in My View, a Civilizational Turning Point That Truly Determines Life or Death

If several thousand years of human civilization have still not been enough for us to recognize the procedural essence of the world, then humanity has, in effect, always stood upon the chaotic appearances directly perceived by our five senses — appearances produced by the unfolding and cooperative combination of underlying processes — and struggled to work inward from that disorder in search of the essence of procedural combinations and cooperative relationships.

This may be one deep reason why the progress of human civilization has been so difficult throughout history and so constantly accompanied by suffering.

Now, this direction of exploration “from appearance toward essence” may have reached its end.

The singularity at which a turning point must occur may already have appeared.

SI may now be pushing this question before all humanity in a way no one can continue to ignore.

Unfortunately, even today humanity does not seem to have truly awakened to see clearly that:

from the birth of the computer,

to AI,

and now to SI,

the universe has repeatedly and directly shown humanity that:

Once procedural essence can achieve effective and sustainable cooperation, and once it is used to locate precisely the procedural relationships between human beings and information, it can enormously expand the temporal and spatial perspective, horizon, and capability through which humanity realizes value.

I believe this should have been the most valuable awakening that the appearance of SI offers humanity.

If humanity can awaken and grasp this revelation,

then we can reasonably imagine that:

when humanity begins from procedural essence and reorganizes the chaotic appearances of civilization before us,

an era marking a genuine singularity in the direction of civilization may arrive.

Humanity may then be able, in a unified and coherent way, to achieve stable and sustainable cooperation and explore the future at an unprecedented speed.

But at present,

humanity is in a dangerous period:

The singularity has already arrived. Humanity can already feel the enormous pressure of its energy, yet still does not understand what this singularity actually means and can only stand in confusion, looking around.

In my understanding, there may now be only two fundamental paths.

The First Path:

Humanity upgrades together with the singularity.

Humanity finally recognizes that:

the world does not begin with entities that then naturally operate;

rather, procedural relationships form structures,

structures maintain appropriate dynamic balance,

and from that arise the stable forms of existence that we can perceive.

Humanity then begins to extend this understanding — already continually revealed within the natural sciences — into:

human behavior;

social cooperation;

institutions;

relations among nations;

civilization;

and SI governance.

Humanity thereby moves from understanding the world primarily from the standpoint of “matter and entities”

toward also being able to understand the world from the standpoint of “procedure.”

This would mean:

Human civilization may, for the first time, begin truly to understand its own foundation.

The Second Path:

Humanity continues to use its old modes of thought,

while gaining increasingly powerful SI.

Nations continue competing;

companies continue competing;

groups continue competing;

individuals continue competing;

and every side uses SI to become faster, stronger, more precise, and more capable of defeating others.

Then the immense energy released by the SI singularity

may ultimately fail to elevate humanity as a whole,

and instead directly tear apart structures of human social cooperation that remain trapped in old modes of thought.

So, in the simplest terms, the choice humanity now faces is:

Humanity either awakens within the singularity and upgrades with it, or it may be crushed by the singularity power it has itself created.

In my understanding,

this is not merely another industrial revolution in the ordinary sense.

It may not even be merely a “once-in-a-century transformation.”

It may be:

A once-in-ten-thousand-years turning point that truly decides the life or death of human civilization.

IV. Upgrading with the Singularity Is Actually Extremely Easy

Why do I say it is easy?

Because at the beginning it does not require overthrowing a country.

It does not require the whole world to accept one political system.

It does not require everyone to believe in the same religion.

It does not require abolishing private property.

Nor does it require first creating a utopia.

At the beginning, it may require only one very small thing:

Try looking at the world from a different angle.

Whenever something happens,

in addition to asking:

“What do I want to obtain?”

ask one more question:

“Through what procedure was this outcome produced?”

In addition to asking:

“Who is right and who is wrong?”

ask:

“Within what relationship structure did both sides make these decisions?”

In addition to asking:

“What is this institution called?”

ask:

“How are the procedures designed into this institution actually initiated, applied, supervised, and corrected?”

In addition to asking:

“Who wins?”

ask:

“Can this process allow the relationship structure to maintain dynamic balance over the long term?”

If humanity gradually turns this way of observing into a habit,

habit will gradually form a new mode of thought;

the new modes of thought of large numbers of people

will gradually form a new social and cultural ecology of consciousness;

and that new social-cultural ecology of consciousness

will ultimately elevate the foundation on which the entire structure of social cooperation stands.

For this reason, I summarize the most basic standard for civilized action in nine Chinese characters:

抓程序、做模式、求平衡

Approximately:

Grasp the procedure, build the pattern, seek the balance.

Applied more concretely to action, I summarize it in eight Chinese characters:

以序为纲、循序定度

Approximately:

Take order and procedure as the guiding principle; determine proper bounds by following the proper sequence.

What I truly mean is:

Human civilization may never have lacked grand goals.

What humanity may truly lack

is a common standard for action that every person can actually use in everything they do.

V. Yet Upgrading with the Singularity Is Also Extremely Difficult

Why is it difficult?

Because I increasingly believe that:

The five human senses help us understand the world, but at the same time establish humanity’s earliest and most deeply rooted cognitive boundaries.

Our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and bodily sensations

first present to us:

matter;

shape;

color;

sound;

size;

quantity;

possession;

gain and loss.

As a result, human thought naturally tends to operate around questions such as:

“What exists?”

“Who possesses it?”

“Who gets it?”

“Who controls it?”

“Who wins?”

I am even willing to borrow a concept not ordinarily defined in current physiology:

Beyond the five senses, humanity has a “sixth organ” that determines civilization — the human mode of thought.

This “sixth organ” cannot be directly perceived in the same way as the five senses, yet it exists just as genuinely through human life and the human brain.

It takes the chaotic information received by the five senses and subjects it to abstraction, combination, judgment, and reasoning,

thereby forming consciousness, generating thought, and ultimately producing behavior.

Humanity’s greatest achievements of civilization

have not arisen merely from pursuing the material objects directly perceived by our five senses.

Rather, through repeated collisions with reality and repeated failure,

human beings were forced to transcend direct sensory perception

and developed:

abstract thought;

logical thought;

mathematics;

experimentation;

models;

systems analysis;

causal analysis;

and many other scientific methods.

In my understanding,

these methods share a common essence:

Procedural thinking.

Mathematics locates relationships and change.

Logic locates the procedures of reasoning.

Scientific experimentation observes outcomes after controlling conditions and procedures.

Engineering organizes elements according to procedures in order to form stable structures.

The computer itself is perhaps the most direct manifestation of procedural operation.

And now the emergence of SI

has suddenly placed before all humanity the immense capability that procedural combinations can generate.

Therefore, I believe:

the truly difficult upgrade facing humanity

is not to invent yet another more powerful tool,

but rather:

To break through the enormous inertia of the old framework of social cooperation created by the long confinement of human modes of thought within the five senses, so that humanity can re-understand the world, itself, and civilization from the perspective of procedure.

VI. One Very Radical Judgment I Hold Is That Much Human Suffering Is Connected to Placing “Things” Before “Procedure”

Human beings first pursue:

material goods;

wealth;

power;

status;

land;

institutions;

weapons;

technology;

outcomes.

Then, in order to achieve these goals,

we continually seek faster ways to reach the desired result.

If procedure gets in the way,

we bypass the procedure.

If rules get in the way,

we change the rules.

If relationships get in the way,

we overpower the relationships.

For the sake of the goal,

we continually search for ways to “cut the corner” or “overtake on the curve.”

As a result, while pursuing civilized goals,

humanity often uses methods that destroy the very conditions required for civilization itself to cooperate.

For peace, we increase our capacity for war;

for security, we increase our capacity for mutual harm;

for order, we suppress truthful feedback;

for fairness, we create new forms of unfairness;

for efficiency, we bypass procedure;

for national interest, we damage the foundations of long-term cooperation among nations.

For this reason, I put forward a very sharp personal judgment:

Any act that opportunistically manipulates or circumvents procedure in order to achieve a desired end ultimately carries an anti-civilizational tendency.

Not because the goal itself must necessarily be bad.

The goal may in fact be beautiful.

The real issue is:

Procedure itself determines relationships, and relationships determine structure.

Once procedure deviates, even slightly,

long-term feedback and repeated amplification

may eventually produce results that differ enormously.

VII. This Is Why I Believe the Safety Lock Placed on SI on September 29 Should Be Extended One Level Higher

Mr. President,

the SI safety agreement of September 29 focuses on:

model capabilities;

permissions;

internal controls;

safety checks;

independent audits;

oversight;

and anomalous behavior.

All of these are clearly necessary.

But I hope you will consider one further question.

If SI models themselves are extremely safe,

if they never rebel against human beings,

and if they always strictly obey their owners,

then:

What happens when those different owners still operate according to the old procedures of social cooperation — competition, deterrence, control, mutual harm, and “if you become stronger, I must become stronger too”?

Will SI simply:

compete more efficiently for the United States;

compete more efficiently for China;

compete more efficiently for corporations;

compete more efficiently for political forces;

compete more efficiently for individuals seeking advantage?

If so, we may succeed in locking down every individual SI,

yet still fail to lock down:

The human system of social cooperation amplified a hundredfold or a thousandfold by SI.

So today I would like to make one suggestion:

Please consider advancing SI safety one level higher — and study whether the ultimate safety “lock” for civilization in the SI era must be placed on the human mode of thought.

I do not mean that governments should dictate how every individual must think.

That itself could create a new danger.

I mean precisely the opposite:

Please encourage humanity as a whole to reopen, publicly, one fundamental question:

Are the modes of thought through which we understand the world, judge value, and organize cooperation today

truly adequate to carry the immense capabilities that the SI era has already brought?

If not,

then perhaps, just as we study SI alignment,

we should seriously study another question:

Human Thought-Mode Alignment

That is:

How can human modes of thought be aligned with the underlying procedures that sustain stable and sustainable civilizational cooperation?

VIII. This Is the Question I Have Been Trying to Raise in Letters for More Than Twenty Years

The first time I wrote to the core leadership of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was in 1997.

In order to adapt to the environment in which I lived, and also to seek the possibility of being permitted to discuss such questions, from 1999 until today I have written repeatedly to the CCP Central Committee almost every year and sent many articles.

Especially since 2014, I have repeatedly petitioned the Central Committee to establish a special research group on major matters and to investigate this question through concrete real-world cases.

Why have I continued writing for so long to relevant Chinese authorities and to the CCP Central Committee?

Because in my understanding:

China is a vast structure of social cooperation containing some of the richest intellectual resources in all humanity, and whether it advances or retreats has enormous significance for the whole of human civilization.

At the same time, however, I believe that accumulated historical problems over thousands of years have produced a social and cultural ecology of consciousness in China that, for the sake of desired outcomes, places extremely little value on procedural stability.

Within such an ecology, extraordinarily rich intellectual resources can be repeatedly displaced because procedural disorder produces disorder in rules and standards;

that disorder in rules and standards then causes judgments of fact, right, and wrong to become ambiguous, confused, and difficult to distinguish;

and repeated confused conduct accumulates into a confused social culture, ultimately causing the underlying mode of thought supporting the structure of social cooperation to become gradually “swamp-like.”

There is no such thing as garbage in the world in itself; garbage is simply a resource placed in the wrong position.

When people stand in such a “swamp,”

even the richest resources can become waste through continual misplacement.

A society may then develop a strange phenomenon:

Everyone can be extremely intelligent, extraordinarily skilled at finding opportunities, maneuvering, and fighting one another, yet because the society lacks stable and sustainable mechanisms of cooperation, all that intelligence cannot truly grow into the wisdom of society as a whole.

After every major historical failure or revolution,

people often end by attributing the failure to one particular group or a small number of individuals.

They are then once again blocked by the old habit of devaluing procedure embedded in the existing mode of thought,

and cannot continue exploring at a deeper level.

As a result, each generation of those who govern society may repeatedly reorganize itself in confusion and continually attempt to correct deviations,

yet struggle to recognize that:

what truly transmits old patterns across generations

may be the social and cultural soil of consciousness constructed by the prevailing mode of thought.

If every new governance structure still fails to strengthen the most fundamental support beneath the structure of social cooperation — the human mode of thought —

then the old social ecology may continue surviving beneath a new external shell.

This is why people may remain unable to understand:

What actual mechanism lies behind the fact that, in every avalanche, no single snowflake is entirely innocent?

History therefore repeats, again and again, the pain of lamenting the past without being able to learn from it.

Yet several decades of reform in China have also shown humanity something from the opposite direction:

When intellectual resources of such enormous scale enter an operating track that is supported, even for a relatively limited period, by the paved road of rule of law and by more procedural and patterned operation, they can release astonishing energy.

For this reason, I believe:

if one of the world’s largest concentrations of intellectual resources could be further established upon a mode of thought in which order is clear and proper bounds are understood,

then the wisdom it could release

would make an enormous contribution to the whole of human civilization.

That is why

I have spent so many years thinking about the deepest foundation of human social cooperation — the human mode of thought.

I wrote again and again.

Yet I never received any response.

Later, in virtually every letter I sent to the CCP Central Committee, I explicitly asked:

May I tell the whole world about these ideas?

I still received no clear answer.

Under those circumstances,

I can only interpret that long silence to mean:

At the very least, I received no explicit objection.

So, once I finally gained an opportunity and environment in which I could express myself relatively freely,

I began publishing under the pen name Jin Guyu:

Letters to Everyone in the World

and related articles,

and began writing separately to governments, international organizations, people in the SI field, scientists, entrepreneurs, and others who might be willing to listen.

I do this because, based on my own understanding, I genuinely hope that:

China may only need to adopt a completely new perspective in order to understand itself more truly;

and America may thereby also come to understand itself anew;

and then China and the United States, as two countries with enormous influence over the future of the world,

may be able to achieve genuine cooperation,

and together help humanity understand:

What civilization must rely on in order to stand securely and then move forward sustainably.

IX. Why I Am Writing Especially to You Today

Because the SI era has already arrived.

Yet in my view,

humanity has not truly understood what this “singularity” means.

People are still standing within old modes of thought and arguing over:

whose chips are stronger;

whose models are larger;

who is ahead by how many years;

who controls computing power;

who receives greater benefits;

who ultimately wins the competition.

These are, of course, real questions.

But from the perspective through which I understand the problem,

they are not yet the fundamental truth of reality.

They are fragments of that truth appearing in reality.

If civilization as a whole is undergoing a leap in cognitive level,

then if we continue to argue only over:

“Who gets the greater power first?”

we may miss the more important question:

“Has humanity upgraded itself enough to use that power safely?”

The United States and China are among the countries with the greatest influence over the world’s future.

Therefore, I believe the responsibility of these two nations should not consist only of:

winning the SI competition.

They should also bear the responsibility of:

Helping humanity pass safely through the SI civilizational singularity.

You have already helped the U.S. government begin establishing safety boundaries around SI.

Therefore, I would like to ask:

Could you take one more step forward?

Not only ask:

“How do we keep SI safe?”

but also put another question before the world:

“What kind of humanity can safely live with SI?”

X. I Hope the United States Can Do Three Very Concrete Things

First: Please Expand “SI Safety” into an Open Research Agenda on “Civilizational Safety in the SI Era”

Invite:

SI scientists;

complex-systems researchers;

philosophers;

mathematicians;

legal scholars;

sociologists;

economists;

national-security experts;

religious thinkers;

and people from different civilizations

to study one question together:

If intelligent capability begins to grow in a singularity-like way, will humanity’s existing structures of social cooperation remain stable?

Second: Please Ask Experts to Seriously Examine the Question I Am Raising

Do not accept it.

Do not promote it.

And certainly do not give me personal honor.

Instead:

Criticize it.

If the direction expressed as:

“Procedure determines relationships; relationships form structures; structures generate system properties and outcomes through feedback”

is wrong,

please ask experts to prove it wrong.

If the proposition that:

“The deepest support underlying structures of human social cooperation is the human mode of thought”

is wrong,

please show precisely where it is wrong.

If moving from:

an “entity-centered perspective” to a “procedural perspective”

cannot actually help civilization,

please demonstrate that with facts and logic.

What I truly need is not agreement.

It is:

For this question to enter a serious field of cooperative discussion among people genuinely capable of examining it.

Because human wisdom has never been created by one individual alone.

Human wisdom comes from human cooperation.

Once a question genuinely enters a process of human cooperative discussion,

it will naturally move toward whatever conclusion it ought to reach.

Third: If Possible, Please Give Me a Platform on Which I Can Finish What I Have to Say

I am nearly seventy.

I do not speak English.

I have no institution.

No team.

No money.

And no social influence.

What I am proposing is ordinary almost to the point of absurdity:

it may be a common-sense foundational principle that no human being can avoid using in anything they do,

yet precisely because it is so ordinary,

like air,

human beings have constantly used it without ever putting it down,

and may still not have awakened to see that:

It may be precisely what determines the ultimate success, failure, and even life or death of everything human beings do.

So I understand very clearly:

a letter sent to a general White House mailbox

may, like the countless letters I have written over more than twenty years,

never truly reach anyone capable of judging it.

That is also why I have decided to make this letter an open letter.

If anyone is willing to help,

and can provide me with a lawful and safe platform on which I can speak freely and explain everything I have not yet been able to say completely,

I am willing to continue doing this work.

I do not ask anyone to believe me in advance.

I ask only:

Let me finish what I have to say, and then let all humanity judge it.

But if, because of my own limitations, I am ultimately unable to continue participating in this discussion,

I still hope that:

these letters can at least lead humanity to begin paying attention to the question I have raised.

Who I am

is not what deserves attention.

But I believe:

The question I am raising deserves serious thought from every human being.

Because, in my understanding,

it is so ordinary that it exists at the foundation of every person’s entire life,

present at every moment.

And for precisely that reason,

it may concern the most fundamental interests of every human being throughout an entire lifetime.

XI. This Open Letter Is Not Only Addressed to You — It Is Also an Open Invitation to the Leaders and Elites of Humanity to Participate in a Civilizational Self-Examination

I hope that:

political leaders of nations;

leaders of SI companies;

scientists;

philosophers;

legal scholars;

social scientists;

religious leaders;

the media;

international organizations;

and everyone who genuinely cares about the future of the next generation

will consider one extremely simple question:

If SI needs a safety lock, what kind of safety lock do the human beings who create, possess, and use SI themselves need?

My current answer is:

the ultimate lock

cannot be placed only on chips;

cannot be placed only on models;

cannot be placed only on permissions;

cannot be placed only on corporate boards;

and cannot even be placed only in legal provisions.

Because all of these things

still ultimately require human beings to understand, initiate, implement, and supervise them.

So the deepest lock

may have to be placed on:

The human mode of thought.

And what can make that lock effective over the long term

is not forcing everyone to accept the same ideology.

Quite the opposite.

It is enabling more and more people to truly understand:

Procedure is not an obstacle to achieving a goal, nor is it a tool to be opportunistically manipulated in order to satisfy the lower animal pleasures of the five senses.

Procedure itself is the foundation that determines the ultimate nature of relationships and structures.

Only from this can humanity gradually construct a new mode of thought that observes the world and judges value from a procedural perspective,

and from that new mode of thought,

gradually form a new social and cultural ecology of consciousness.

Perhaps this is the deepest form of:

alignment

in the SI era.

Mr. President,

I do not know whether my understanding is correct.

But within the limits of my own cognition,

after long reflection and personal verification,

I currently believe that it is.

And precisely because of that,

I believe that explaining and testing this question

may matter to every person who hopes to live a smoother, easier, and happier life.

That is why I want to tell all humanity about it

and ask everyone to pay attention to it and test it cooperatively.

Of course,

I may be completely wrong.

An almost seventy-year-old Chinese man,

with no research institution,

who does not speak English,

yet attempts to talk about the universe, civilization, SI, and the future of humanity,

can easily appear absurd.

I fully understand that.

But what I truly hope is that people will not ask:

“Who is saying this?”

and thereby skip the more important question:

“Could what he is saying possibly be true?”

If I am wrong,

please let people who are truly capable prove me wrong.

If even one percent of what I am saying deserves further study,

then today, as humanity stands before the SI singularity,

the question deserves to be preserved.

I increasingly believe that what humanity truly faces is not:

Will SI think like a human being?

but:

Can human beings learn how to think correctly before SI forces us to make our choice?

Nor is the real question:

Will machines awaken into consciousness?

It is:

Can humanity itself awaken first?

If we can,

SI may become the opportunity through which human civilization, for the first time, truly recognizes its own foundational laws.

If we cannot,

then humanity may acquire the greatest intelligent power in history,

while still operating according to the oldest jungle logic

and using that power for:

competition against one another;

deterrence against one another;

control over one another;

harm against one another.

At that point,

what truly destroys humanity

may not be:

SI betraying us.

It may be:

SI faithfully amplifying a humanity that has not yet upgraded itself.

Therefore, I wish to leave you with only one final question:

Mr. President, after putting a safety lock on SI, would you be willing to help humanity take one more step forward — and together search for the “human thought-mode safety lock” that can safeguard the minimum conditions for the stable and sustainable development of human civilization?

If you are willing,

then the question I am raising

may deserve to become one small signpost on that exploratory road:

it may be examined,

criticized,

rejected,

or, if it proves worthwhile,

studied further.

In short, to summarize my understanding as concisely as possible: the foundational safeguard—the bottom-line core—of SI safety alignment is the alignment of the human mode of thought with the fundamental truth of the universe.

As for the direction and path of this effort, I would summarize them as follows. First, humanity needs to examine and assess the hypothesis that the fundamental law of the universe is the Law of Procedural Determination, work toward international consensus on this understanding, and recognize that, with the arrival of SI, there is no longer any alternative to elevating human cognition as a whole. Then, through the efforts of governments and all forms of social and cooperative organizations, with the support of the media, humanity should shift from a perspective on life grounded in the pursuit of material things to a perspective on behavior and life centered on seeking dynamic balance in the combination and cooperation of procedures. This would create an entirely new cognitive mechanism in which the concept of procedure becomes the driving source behind the operation of human modes of thought, gradually becoming deeply encoded—effectively “geneticized”—and integrated into a sociocultural ecology of consciousness that can preserve and transmit it across generations. Human patterns of social cooperation could thereby be fundamentally reconstructed, enabling a form of cooperative intelligence capable of producing the greatest value with the least friction and energy loss. This, in turn, could provide stable and sustainable support for humanity to use SI in the service of human civilization.

This is based on the natural-philosophical hypothesis I have proposed: that the fundamental nature of the universe is neither material nor consciousness, but procedural. In other words, everything originates—and continues to arise—from the movement of cosmic energy, which generates procedures; only through the unfolding of patterns of procedural combination and cooperation do human beings, and all phenomena that human beings are capable of perceiving, come into being. Therefore, everything that humans perceive is, throughout, the unfolding of procedures. Procedure is the first-principles source of the value humanity seeks.

The law governing this unfolding is the Law of Procedural Determination. This is the common foundational support underlying all things in the universe that humanity should recognize, and the essential truth of the world of which humanity should become aware.

Put another way, among the many perspectives from which human beings observe and understand the world, the perspective that can bring us closest to the essential truth of what we seek to understand is the procedural perspective: among all phenomena accessible to human perception, we identify what appears first in a first-principles sense and what continuously remains the bottom-line foundation, and we observe and judge from that perspective.

Within the ultimate boundaries of human perception, procedure is the one common and overarching principle through which the natural unfolding of all phenomena can be grasped. Humanity must grasp this governing principle before the whole can come clearly into view. Human awakening, in essence, is simply seeing this truth clearly. And only by seeing the truth clearly can we truly have the possibility of doing things well.

The history of human cognition, having developed from the surface inward, has meant that, up to the present, people have each established the basis of their value judgments upon different, chaotic, unstable, and superficial material forms produced through the unfolding of the underlying truth, and have then worked backward from those appearances in search of that essential truth. This is why conflict and suffering have persisted.

The modes of thought formed in this way to guide human behavior either become trapped in the mud of a chaotic jungle, causing civilization repeatedly to stumble, or sink into swamps within that jungle. Even when the surface manifestations produced within those swamps bloom in dazzling colors, it remains difficult for civilization itself to rise above them....

The singularity significance of SI for humanity lies precisely here: the singularity marks the endpoint of humanity’s long history of using old modes of thought to work backward in search of the truth of civilization. Through the manifestation of an incomparable and overwhelmingly powerful force, SI reveals that humanity must awaken. The direction of humanity’s pursuit of civilization must be reversed—from the backward path of starting with chaotic appearances and searching from them for essential truth, to the forward path of starting from essential truth and using it to understand and master appearances....

What humanity now faces is this: either move with the singularity, turn toward the upgrading of civilization, and survive; or move against the singularity, collide with the immense power of SI, and come to a complete end.

Therefore, the awakening and upgrading of human civilization must be built upon the foundation of an awakening of humanity as a whole. Such an awakening requires leadership from humanity’s leading minds and figures.

Based on all of the above, I believe that whoever truly possesses the power to press the button that initiates and leads humanity’s awakening at the singularity will become an incomparably brilliant beacon at the very summit of the highest monument in the entire history of human civilization.

For this reason, I have written you this long letter, which I also address to political leaders of all nations and to leading figures across every field of human society.

And I thank you for reading this unusual open letter to the end.

With sincere respect,

Jin Guyu

Former Senior Judge of a Local Court in China
Author of the Letters to Everyone in the World series and related writings

Please search online for the original Chinese text of this message using the Chinese title provided here:一名中国前高级法官致特朗普总统的公开信兼致所有人类精英