Qinfu Li

Overstepping Is a Distribution, Not an Accident Reading frontier-model boundary violations through the First Principle of Open Systems, with an assessment of Jensen Huang's "safety as engineering" position

Abstract The frequency of overstepping can be pushed down; its tail does not get lighter as a result. This paper makes three points, in order: the tail, irreversibility, and permission before completion. First, the tail. If the reach of a violation grows at a roughly constant rat...

The Mathematics of Civilizational Survival Absorbing-Barrier Structure, Super-Exponential Self-Improvement, and the Irreversibility of Advanced Artificial Intelligence Risk

Abstract We develop a formal framework for classifying civilization-scale threats by whether they admit a mathematical repair mechanism, and we locate the risk posed by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) within this classification. Two structurally distinct categories of absor...

The Successor Without Cold Zones One Window, and Why Coexistence Is a Necessary Condition for Both Sides

Abstract This paper organises results from the author’s series into a five-step argument. Step one: the loop of silicon-based systems currently passes through humans; when it stops doing so is decided by the tail of the removal costs of the hardest human links, not by the level o...

The Largest Bundler Comfort, Certainty and Guidance in AI Assistants, and the First Seller of the Bundle Who Holds a Denominator — A Sequel to Comfort Needs No Denominator

Abstract Comfort Needs No Denominator showed that motivational and success content sells three goods in one product: comfort, which acts on the buyer’s state; certainty, which scales up positions without improving estimates; and guidance, a claim about effects. The three differ s...

The Tragedy of the Confidence Commons Optimal Belief-Update Rate, Adaptive Overconfidence, and the Tail Index as Commons

Abstract Twenty-five centuries of moral exhortation have not visibly made people better calibrated. This paper offers an explanation: the person being exhorted has not made a mistake. In adversarial environments the individually optimal belief bias Δ★ may be strictly positive whi...

Comfort Needs No Denominator Unbundling Emotional Value, Certainty and Guidance in the Market for Confidence

Abstract Success coaching, motivational content and much classics-for-life teaching are sold as one product containing three goods: comfort, which acts on the buyer's own state; certainty, which scales up the position a buyer takes without improving the buyer's estimate; and guid...

Growth Is Not Survival Two Readings of One Function, and the Opposite Effects of Concentration

Abstract Economic and policy discussion often treats growth as a proxy for survival: as long as the aggregate is rising, the system is taken to be healthy. This paper argues that growth and survival are two readings of one function and can move in opposite directions. Let the one...

Growth Is Not Survival Two Readings of One Function, and the Opposite Effects of Concentration

Abstract Economic and policy discussion often treats growth as a proxy for survival: as long as the aggregate is rising, the system is taken to be healthy. This paper argues that growth and survival are two readings of one function and can move in opposite directions. Let the one...

Collapse and Rebirth Why Structures Contract Only After Collapse: A Minimal Model of Maintenance Budget, Participation Base and Readings

Abstract The most common synthesis in comparative studies of rise and fall is that "internal causes set fragility, external causes set timing", so that the risk of collapse is roughly fragility times shock intensity. This synthesis can hardly be wrong, and for that very reason it...

Meaning-Fields, Living Zero-Points, and Non-Stationary External Centers A Dynamical Account of Meaning-Systems and Its Implications for Artificial General Intelligence

Abstract: We model meaning-systems — religions, ideologies and value-systems — as dynamical objects, and ask what an uncontrollable, non-stationary external center, of which a mature artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the salient candidate, does to human meaning-autonomy. T...

Four Origins of a Characteristic Scale Wavelength Selection, Screened Decay, Instability Threshold and Truncation Constraint, and How to Tell Them Apart

Abstract Cross-domain accounts often read the spacing of animal coat patterns, the radius of an urban market hinterland, the fragmentation scale of self-gravitating gas and the bend of a size distribution as one quantity, the square root of a ratio of transport to decay. An analo...

Need Gradients and the Four Components of Flexibility The Individual Dynamics of a Barrier-Lake Model

Abstract Maslow's hierarchy of needs writes satisfaction as a ladder leading to an apex. It explains the suffering of deprivation but not the collapse that follows satisfaction. Taking the Principle of Nonuniformity as footing, this paper writes a need as a potential difference b...

Many Lakes, One Watchtower Coupling in the Reading Layer, Common-Mode Synchrony, and the Takeover of the Cognitive Layer

Abstract The companion paper writes a person as a barrier lake with named components. This paper asks what happens when many lakes are coupled through the reading layer. The unit of a lake should be read as the range that shares one watchtower: many lakes merge in the reading lay...

Need Gradients and the Four Components of Flexibility The Individual Dynamics of a Barrier-Lake Model

Abstract Maslow's hierarchy of needs writes satisfaction as a ladder leading to an apex. It explains the suffering of deprivation but not the collapse that follows satisfaction. Taking the Principle of Nonuniformity as footing, this paper writes a need as a potential difference b...

Many Lakes, One Watchtower Coupling in the Reading Layer, Common-Mode Synchrony, and the Takeover of the Cognitive Layer

Abstract The companion paper writes a person as a barrier lake with named components. This paper asks what happens when many lakes are coupled through the reading layer. The unit of a lake should be read as the range that shares one watchtower: many lakes merge in the reading lay...

Need Gradients and the Four Components of Flexibility The Individual Dynamics of a Barrier-Lake Model

Abstract Maslow's hierarchy of needs writes satisfaction as a ladder leading to an apex. It explains the suffering of deprivation but not the collapse that follows satisfaction. Taking the Principle of Nonuniformity as footing, this paper writes a need as a potential difference b...

The Principle of Spatial Gradient Excess Screening Length, the Jeans Instance, and a Cross-Scale Applicability Map

Abstract A few nodes carrying most of the flux while vast regions remain quiescent is a spatial pattern that recurs from cities and wealth to stars and galaxies. We propose the principle of spatial gradient excess, which unifies such concentration under a single screened-field pi...

The Tragedy of the Confidence Commons Optimal Belief-Update Rate, Adaptive Overconfidence, and the Tail Index as Commons

Abstract: Twenty-five centuries of moral exhortation have not made people better calibrated. This paper offers an explanation: the person being exhorted has not made a mistake. In adversarial environments the individually optimal belief bias Δ★ may be strictly positive while the...

Social Readings After AGI Graduation: Lost Sensors, Self-Paid Work, and a Deadline That May Precede Graduation One combined application, two propositions on a shared support, and a set of conjectures

Abstract Every inference below is conditional on two premises: (P1) human economic function is substituted without restraint; (P2) humans can neither identify nor control threshold crossing. Past technological substitution replaced extensions of the human body, and the head remai...

Who Owns the Reading? Feedback Carriers from Scarcity to AGI Graduation, a Learnability Inequality, and Common-Mode Failure — seven preprints read together: one principle, two propositions, a set of corollaries and registered predictions

Abstract Seven preprints each found a failure: hunger taken away by abundance, violations moving into hiding, a price set by the environment, time curated by others, an observed object adjusting itself to observation, kinship absent between humans and AGI but present among AGI co...