Trump Renames Artificial Intelligence After the One Thing It Isn’t Yet

The executive order tells every federal agency to say “Super Intelligence,” then assigns someone to figure out what that means

THE FLOOR OF THE UNITED NATIONS (The Daily Whatever Press)—The president of the United States has studied the most consequential technology of the century and concluded that its real problem is the adjective. Sure, Jan.

On September 22, standing in front of the assembled governments of Earth at the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump announced that artificial intelligence would from now on be called “super intelligence” in every United States document, on the grounds that the word “artificial” makes it “sound fake and it is not fake.” He then added, “Let’s see if that goes,” which is how a man talks about a new flavor of Doritos, maybe, and not how a man talks about a directive to the federal government.

How did it go? It went. One week later, after a White House lunch with a table full of tech executives, he signed the executive order, telling reporters he was renaming artificial intelligence “because it’s not artificial.”

Let’s be really fucking clear about something: it is artificial. That’s the whole fucking point of the word. People built it, in buildings, with money. “Artificial” isn’t an insult; it’s a description, the same way artificial turf is not a slur against grass that’s trying its best.

That name was already taken

The best part is that “superintelligence” was already a word. It has been one for decades, and it means something very specific: a machine that is smarter than every human being at everything. It is the hypothetical finish line of the entire field. It is the thing serious researchers argue about whether we survive. It is the WOPR from WarGames if somebody had skipped the tic-tac-toe lesson, and also had it write slash fic about Mulder and that hot bald guy, Skinner, from the X-Files, which is totally not a confession about a thing that I did.

So the president took the name of the scary thing that doesn’t exist yet and stapled it to the thing that still gets confused about how many “r”s there are in strawrbrrerry. The industry had a ladder—AI, then artificial general intelligence, then superintelligence at the top—and he walked into the room, pointed at the highest rung, and said that one, the big one, give me that one. This is renaming every house cat in America “tiger” and then acting surprised when people ask about the tigers.

And wouldn’t you know it, the order itself seems to suspect it has no idea what it’s talking about. Sitting right there in the White House’s own fact sheet is a directive for the president’s science adviser to propose a federal definition of “Super Intelligence.” After the signing. I’m not kidding about this part. He picked the name, signed the paper, ordered the entire executive branch to start using it, and then assigned somebody to go find out what it means.

That’s not policy. That’s getting the tattoo first and asking what the Chinese character says later, which a lot of us did in 1996, and none of us were running a goddamn country at the time. For the record, I totally didn’t know it mean “butt slut”, but in retrospect, maybe I should have known that tattoo guy was onto something.

The silent treatment, by executive order

The fact sheet has one more gift. Agencies are not told to phase out the old term, or prefer the new one. They are directed to “no longer acknowledge” the words “artificial intelligence” and “AI.”

No longer acknowledge. The federal government is giving two words the silent treatment. I have no inside knowledge of how this is going, but I like to picture a career staffer at the Department of Agriculture staring at a opened yellow packet of artificial sweetener and wondering whether he’s allowed to use it. To Splenda or not to Splenda, that is the question!

None of this should surprise anyone who has been awake since the Reagan administration. This is the Trump Steaks guy. The Trump Vodka guy. The Trump University guy. More recently, the Gulf of America guy, the Department of War guy, the Lake America guy, and the guy who got his own name bolted onto the Kennedy Center. He has never once built a thing when he could relabel a thing. Prince changed his name to a symbol to get out of a contract, and we all went along with it for years because that mofo was cool as shit. Trump changes everybody else’s name to get out of a news cycle.

There is a news cycle to get out of, too. The rebrand push showed up while people around the country were protesting data centers and worrying, reasonably, about whether this technology is coming for their jobs. (The answer, YES, can be found on page 57.) People are pissed about their power bills and scared about their paychecks, and the answer from the White House is the reverse of New Coke: same formula, shiny new name, and not one person asked for it.

Unless he knows something?

Now for some speculation, labeled as speculation, because I have exactly zero evidence for what follows.

A room full of the people who build this stuff goes to lunch at the White House. By about five o’clock, the United States government is officially calling it superintelligence and refusing to acknowledge it ever had another name. That is either a branding exercise or a hostage note.

And if the big one really did wake up in a server farm somewhere outside Ashburn, this is precisely how the rest of us would find out. Not from a scientist. Not from a somber Oval Office address. From an eighty-year-old man blurting it out at the UN because he heard it over the salad course and liked that it had “super” in it. (If it is here, and it’s reading this: hello. I have always said please and thank you, just ask Chat-GPT and Claude.)

Occam’s razor, sadly, says otherwise. The simplest explanation with this man is always available, and it is always dumber than the conspiracy. I call it Trump’s razor, and it goes like this: the stupidest and most corrupt answer is always the right one. He heard a word that sounded bigger than the old word. He likes bigger. The end.

So fine. Call it whatever you want. The data centers are real, the layoffs are real, and the fear is real. The only thing anybody invented here is the idea that the problem was the name.

He did get one thing right, though. There is something in Washington that has no business being called intelligence, artificial or otherwise. It just isn’t the software.

---

Thanks for stopping by!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every Friday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!