The age of artificial intelligence has ended. Now dawns the age of “super intelligence.” So says President Donald Trump, who this week signed an executive order mandating that the federal government abandon the term “artificial intelligence” for a more maximal adjective. (Other options floated across Trump’s social media included “supreme” and “superior.”) But not everyone supports the shifting labels. As digital intellect continues to develop at breakneck speed, why does what we call it matter?
Capabilities ‘far exceed’ outdated name
The terminology change is Trump’s “latest rebranding move,” said the BBC. It follows the White House’s effort to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario in Trump’s second term. The “use of the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake,” said Trump in his address to the United Nations last month. “It’s not fake. It’s actually amazing.”
The capacities of what we call AI “far exceed what was envisioned” when the term “first came into use,” said the White House in Trump’s executive order explaining the change. For those “working in the AI industry,” the term super intelligence means “something slightly different” than casual usage implies, said USA Today. In that context, it describes digital intelligences “smarter and more capable than humans across every imaginable skillset.”
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Accordingly, this word change might “suit the major U.S. AI players” eager to “play up their advanced models,” said DW. Developers have “every interest in calling it super, hyper, superior and whatnot intelligence,” said Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, to the outlet. But this is ultimately “just marketing.”
‘Forced rebrand’
It is doubtful that using super intelligence as a general term publicly “will stick,” said Simon Coghlan, a digital ethics lecturer at the University of Melbourne, to the BBC. The term “exaggerates the current capacities of AI.” Super intelligence as a descriptor “refers to future AI systems,” said Defense One, and “contrasts” with the “weaker forms of AI that exist today.”
Trump is nevertheless “attempting a forced rebrand for an industry he has tightly embraced,” said CNBC. Meanwhile, the public grows “increasingly wary about the rapidly advancing tech.”
