Trump's 'Super Intelligence' Rebrand of AI Is a Dishonest Euphemism
Source: https://www.facebook.com/americanspectator/. "Trump Orders Agencies to Drop ‘AI’ for ‘Super Intelligence’ | The American Spectator | USA News and Politics." October 1, 2026. spectator.org
The Gist
The author argues that Trump's move to officially rename 'AI' as 'super intelligence' is a dishonest marketing trick, not an accurate description. Current AI chatbots are just sophisticated text predictors that don't actually understand or think the way humans do, so calling them 'super intelligent' is misleading and plays into unrealistic sci-fi fantasies about machines surpassing human minds.
Conclusion
The Trump administration's executive order renaming 'artificial intelligence' to 'super intelligence' is dishonest and misleading, even if the political motivation behind it is understandable.
Premises
- Names and terminology shape how people perceive and think about reality, as argued by Chesterton and Orwell regarding euphemisms.
- 'Super intelligence' already has an established technical meaning in the tech field: machines that cognitively outperform humans, which has not yet been achieved.
- Large language models (LLMs) function by predicting likely next words based on statistical patterns in training data, not by genuine understanding or comprehension.
- True intelligence requires the ability to understand, learn new things, independently generate novel ideas, and link concepts in original ways—capabilities LLMs have not demonstrated.
- Even a young child possesses genuine comprehension and conceptual reasoning abilities that current AI systems lack.
- Labeling LLMs as 'super intelligent' implicitly promotes a transhumanist narrative that machines may surpass or merge with human cognition, which is not supported by the technology's actual capabilities.
Assumptions
- Precise and honest language has intrinsic value and consequences for public understanding and policy, independent of political expediency.
- There is a meaningful, definable distinction between genuine intelligence/understanding and sophisticated pattern-matching or language prediction.
- The public is susceptible to having their beliefs about technology shaped by official terminology used by the government.
- The executive order's rebranding was motivated primarily by a desire to improve public perception of AI amid the US-China tech race, rather than a genuine technical reassessment.
- Transhumanist philosophy (merging humans with machines) is an undesirable or fantastical outcome that the author views with skepticism.