Speaking to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, President Trump announced that artificial intelligence will henceforth be called “super intelligence” — SI — in all United States government documents, because the word “artificial” makes the technology sound fake. The new name came off a Truth Social poll in which “super” beat “superior” and “extreme” roughly two to one.
By Wednesday a State Department official had emailed staff instructing them to change every reference in agency material. The industry has not followed: “superintelligence” already has a specific meaning in the field — a system that outperforms humans at essentially everything — and no major lab has adopted the rename.
The line of the day went to Canada. Asked whether Ottawa would follow suit, its AI minister said Canadians are “not enthusiastic” about renaming things — a nod to the earlier suggestion that Lake Ontario become Lake America.