Why Trump’s Rebrand of Artificial Intelligence to Super Intelligent Matters

President Donald Trump has declared that federal agencies will no longer recognize the term artificial intelligence, which has been in use for more than 70 years, in favor of super intelligence. He unveiled the change last month at the White House in front of technology executives, and industry leaders have followed his lead. Jeff Bezos endorsed it, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang adopted it, and Elon Musk opened a SpaceX earnings call with it this week before repeating it at least nine more times.

Time columnist David Litt, a former presidential speechwriter, agrees that words matter but says the new label points in the wrong direction. Existing vocabulary, he argues, already dwells on intelligence and neglects artifice, casting software as a being instead of an object. Chatbot interfaces display thinking indicators, and developers, among them OpenAI's Dan Selsam and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, speak of models that believe or cheat.

Litt maintains these systems are tools, and that human-style descriptions shift blame from the programmers to the programs. A car lacking brakes, he points out, is called unsafe, not a rogue model.

Summarized by PolitiKool from Time’s reporting. Read the full story at Time →