In remarks to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, President Trump declared that the U.S. would now refer to AI as SI — “super intelligence.”
From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to ‘artificial.’ So it’s super intelligence.
That’s not one of the terms he had invited people to vote on in his Truth Social post the other day. And the selection comes with a number of problems, some of which may be intentional.
Most obviously to AI insiders, the term “superintelligence” was already used to mean something else: AI that vastly outperforms humans at all cognitive tasks, or at least all the tasks that matter for control of Earth. Artificial superintelligence is the thing Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar are trying to ban in the bill they formally unveiled today. I don’t think sticking to the one-word “superintelligence” for the strongly superhuman stuff will sufficiently differentiate it from Trump’s two-word “super intelligence” in the discourse, particularly when that discourse is spoken rather than written. I’ve also seen outlets reporting on the rebranding sometimes write Trump’s version as one word.
In fairness, the term “superintelligence” was already becoming diluted thanks to folks like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has been using it as a name for products that would fall well short of the intended meaning. But the concept is still important, and people still need to talk about it. Expect to see a lot more use of “superhuman intelligence” or “artificial superintelligence” or “ASI” to refer to the stronger stuff.
I personally think Trump’s motive is what he says it is — trying to correct the problem where “artificial” suggests something fake and ineffectual. For Trump, this may be mostly about trying to get people to think more highly of the unpopular technology, but I, too, am annoyed when people refer to what newer agents are doing as “artificial reasoning” or “synthetic reasoning.” That’s like calling what a calculator does “artificial arithmetic,” or what an airplane does “artificial flight.” Intelligence points to what a system does, not to what it’s made out of or how it operates. (I may start using “machine intelligence” more as a tag for the intelligence happening outside of human brains.)
If I’m wrong and Trump’s choice of words is actually more strategic, the intent might be to muddy the discourse around the extinction problem. It’s easier to smear someone as a Luddite if the specific thing they’re trying to ban has a label that can now refer to all AI.
But if that’s the strategy, I think it’s just as likely to backfire in one of two ways — by raising awareness of superintelligence as a concept in the ensuing name debate, or by crushing the nuance out of public opposition: If it’s hard to distinguish between self-driving cars, drug discovery tools, and vastly superhuman machines, then people will insist on banning all of it.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.