{"id":929400,"date":"2026-10-11T20:36:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T20:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/929400\/"},"modified":"2026-10-11T20:36:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T20:36:11","slug":"what-trump-gets-wrong-about-super-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/929400\/","title":{"rendered":"What Trump gets wrong about \u2018super intelligence\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n A version of this story appeared in CNN\u2019s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\n Unable to convince Americans to embrace the AI data centers they hate<\/a>, President Donald Trump is instead exercising the one power he believes is absolute in the presidency: a rebrand.\n <\/p>\n

\n But unlike Lake America<\/a>, the Gulf of America,<\/a> military bases<\/a> or a mountain,<\/a> this change is about altering public opinion rather than scoring political points.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump first told fellow world leaders at the United Nations last month<\/a> that \u201cuse of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n After Trump signed an executive order in late September, the US government has been changing official documents and websites. Cabinet secretaries and other aides immediately used the new term.\n <\/p>\n

\n Elon Musk said on X that he would change the name of his company from SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, although that particular change has not yet occurred.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump has refused to answer questions that use the old term. He told supporters at a campaign rally in Nebraska that he would henceforth repurpose \u201cartificial\u201d \u2014 an \u201cugly\u201d word, he said \u2014 for the news media.\n <\/p>\n

\n On Thursday, the president said on social media that anyone who uses the term artificial intelligence instead of super intelligence will be viewed by his White House as \u201cTHE ENEMY!\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n All of this might feel very much like Trump\u2019s \u201cweave\u201d \u2014 the mental meanderings of Trump\u2019s public statements \u2014 but it has also been fascinating to watch the infrastructure of the federal government respond to what many Americans might write off as a semantic distinction.\n <\/p>\n

\n There are things that are out of Trump\u2019s power \u2014 passing spending bills, renaming the Kennedy Center, ending his war against Iran \u2014 but he has shown that presidents have power to change names.\n <\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s also evidence he knows the unpopularity of data centers and concerns about AI in general<\/a> at a time when he is a major booster of AI.\n <\/p>\n

Will a rebrand be effective?<\/p>\n

\n Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long pushed to view AI as superintelligence. In August, he published a 6,000-word treatise<\/a> about how Meta would approach AI. In rose assessments of the future, he referred to the promise of superintelligence. When he referred to AI, it was usually in reference to what he argued were unfounded worries. Zuckerberg said Meta will be committed to an open source model that provides for superintelligent agents working on behalf of every individuals.\n <\/p>\n

\n OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico\u2019s \u201cDecoded\u201d podcast<\/a> there are no plans to change the name of his company to OpenSI. But he did say that people in the industry have been using the term superintelligence for a while.\n <\/p>\n

\"OpenAI<\/p>\n

\n It might be a better term, ultimately, than artificial intelligence, but \u201cstill sort of understates the magnitude of what I think is happening,\u201d Altman said.\n <\/p>\n

\n Altman predicted people would still use the term AI and questioned whether Trump\u2019s rebrand would accomplish its goal of changing people\u2019s opinions of AI.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cDoes superintelligence sound obviously less scary to people than artificial intelligence?\u201d Altman wondered. Time will tell.\n <\/p>\n

\n What is definitely true is that the concept of superintelligence, while it sounds better in Trump\u2019s view, is arguably distinct from AI and should be no less intimidating to Americans.\n <\/p>\n

\n The term artificial intelligence has its roots in the 1950s, when a group of Dartmouth professors held a summertime conference \u201con the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Superintelligence, at least academically, seems more like the next step of artificial intelligence, or artificial generative intelligence. That happens when the machines learn.\n <\/p>\n

\n The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has written extensively about superintelligence, including in the 2014 book \u201cSuperintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Here\u2019s how Bostrum first defined superintelligence<\/a> in a 1997 essay:\n <\/p>\n

\n By a \u201csuperintelligence\u201d we mean an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills. This definition leaves open how the superintelligence is implemented: it could be a digital computer, an ensemble of networked computers, cultured cortical tissue or what have you. It also leaves open whether the superintelligence is conscious and has subjective experiences.\n <\/p>\n

\n Asked how he views Trump\u2019s rebrand, Bostrum said that from a technical perspective AI has traditionally \u201cbeen this wide umbrella term that refers to every form of intelligent information processing in machines.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n We\u2019re talking everything from the Google searches and email spam filters, the current crop of AIs and \u201chypothetical future more powerful ones.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIf the idea is to use the new word superintelligence to cover all of that, it\u2019s a little bit of a stretch, maybe, to call my spam filter a superintelligence,\u201d Bostrum told CNN.\n <\/p>\n

\n In the theoretical evolution of AI, what comes next, he said is AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which refers to a system that has the same kind of learning and reasoning as humans, something Atman says might already have occurred.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cSuperintelligence was reserved for this sort of hypothetical future form of artificial intelligence that not only matched but radically exceeded humans across all cognitive domain,\u201d according to Bostrum.\n <\/p>\n

\n That is exactly the thing that frightens the AI \u201cdoomers.\u201d But it is incomprehensible to Trump that the machines could outwit him.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe only control or \u2018guardrails\u2019 that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!\u201d Trump wrote in September, arguing against any sort of AI regulation.\n <\/p>\n

\"President<\/p>\n

\n Bostrum has written both about potential pitfalls of superintelligence as well as the enormous potential to improve and extend human life. But by changing the name, Trump seems to just want to control the narrative.\n <\/p>\n

\n Bostrum doesn\u2019t necessarily think it\u2019s a bad idea.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt\u2019s not up to me to decide how English language should be used,\u201d he said. \u201cI mean, it\u2019s good for my book sales, I guess.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n He does see the rhetorical argument for a new term: It\u2019s harder to argue against super intelligence than artificial intelligence.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIf you define superintelligence as we already have superintelligence and it hasn\u2019t caused any catastrophe yet, then what\u2019s the big deal? And you then would need to introduce some new term to refer to this like hypothetical future capability that\u2019s even more powerful.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump knows a thing or two about saying things so much that they take hold in the public. He rarely speaks in public without repeating the same talking points about \u201cfake\u201d news, the \u201cradical left\u201d Democrats, or about how wonderful his own leadership has been, regardless of what the facts are.\n <\/p>\n

\n At the UN, Trump compared his rebrand to the evolution of \u201cglobal warming,\u201d which he said was \u201creborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n That\u2019s not exactly what happened, as anyone paying attention to the warming climate in recent years can pretty easily confirm.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A version of this story appeared in CNN\u2019s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":929401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-929400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=929400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/929401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=929400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=929400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=929400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}