Please check your browser history before proceeding. If you’ve recently used the phrase “artificial intelligence,” the president has identified you as a threat. You may have thought you were discussing a chatbot, but apparently you were participating in an insurgency with excellent autocomplete.
On Thursday, Donald Trump announced that anyone using “Artificial Intelligence” instead of his preferred “Super Intelligence” is “THE ENEMY!” He described the replacement as “highly accepted” and “more accurate,” which is an efficient way to announce that everyone agrees with you immediately before threatening everyone who doesn’t.
I appreciate having this clarified. There are so many things to keep track of these days, and I would hate to accidentally overthrow the government while asking a computer what to make with the ingredients in my refrigerator.
This latest presidential vocabulary emergency follows a September 29 executive order directing federal agencies, to the extent permitted by law, to replace “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in their communications, websites, reports, and policy documents. Somewhere, a federal employee has presumably had to interrupt actual work to perform a patriotic find-and-replace, carefully restoring national greatness one abbreviation at a time.
As a mother, I recognize the general atmosphere of someone announcing that a thing has a new name and expecting the entire household to reorganize around it. Usually, though, we can resolve this with a snack. The executive order suggests we have missed that window.
There’s also the inconvenient matter of words meaning things. Superintelligence, usually written as one word, already has an established meaning. Nick Bostrom described it in a 2003 paper as an intellect vastly outperforming the best human brains across practically every field, including scientific creativity, wisdom, and social skills. Being exceptionally good at one task doesn’t qualify. Calling all AI “superintelligence” is like renaming every bicycle a fighter jet. You can demand that the Transportation Department update its paperwork, but you’re still pedaling to the grocery store.
The most beautiful detail is tucked into the order’s own definition. For purposes of the rebrand, “Super Intelligence” means the technology already covered by the existing legal definition of artificial intelligence. The old name remains underneath, holding the whole thing together while the new name poses for photographs. It’s like declaring your minivan a Supreme Transportation Eagle and then explaining, in the paperwork, that a Supreme Transportation Eagle is a minivan. The transmission still makes that noise. You have achieved nothing mechanically, but the neighbors now know to avoid you.
And then there’s the website. The administration’s technology site promotes the era of Super Intelligence at AI.gov. That is still its address as of this writing. The enemy is in the address bar. Imagine being the person tasked with explaining this. Mr. President, we have successfully replaced the offending terminology throughout the page, but visitors must still type the treason into their computers to get there. We could change the address, of course, but then we would need to redirect people from the enemy website, creating a potentially sensitive national security relationship between the two.
There are serious questions we could be asking about this technology: who benefits, who bears the costs, what happens to our work, and whether our children will inherit a world where they can trust what they see. Those questions require patience, competence, and a willingness to hear answers that don’t flatter the person asking.
Fortunately, the president has found something much easier to manage: the adjective.
Changing the name lets him announce a technological triumph without waiting for the technology to do anything new. Then, when somebody uses the familiar term, he can announce an enemy without waiting for that person to do anything wrong.
For now, please practice saying “Super Intelligence” with the appropriate enthusiasm. The machines may someday become smarter than all of us, but first they will have to survive being governed by a man who has picked a fight with his own URL.
Donald Trump is demented. Somebody needs to drop a net over him. And that somebody is us.
Unbelievable.