Trump wants AI to become SI: Why it’s not that simple

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Trump wants AI to become SI

Trump says goodbye to AI

Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official communications, websites, and other non-statutory documents. Existing regulations, contracts, grants, and other historical documents do not have to be rewritten.

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Trump's problem is mainly with the word “artificial.” He argues that it makes the technology sound fake and that “super” better reflects what increasingly capable systems can do. There is some logic to questioning the name: artificial intelligence has never been a particularly precise description of technologies ranging from recommendation algorithms to chatbots and image generators.

Researchers have argued about what intelligence itself means for almost as long as they have tried to reproduce it in machines.

How did AI get its name anyway?

The story begins in 1955, when Dartmouth mathematician John McCarthy and researchers Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon proposed a summer workshop around an ambitious idea: machines might someday perform tasks associated with human intelligence.

They called it the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. The meeting took place in 1956 and became one of the founding moments of AI as a scientific field. Other terms were already circulating, including machine intelligence and cybernetics, but McCarthy's phrase stuck.

It also escaped the laboratory. Over the following decades, AI became not just a scientific term but an idea millions of people encountered through books, television, and cinema.

We imagined AI before we actually had it

Science fiction gave audiences intelligent machines long before engineers could build anything remotely comparable. Isaac Asimov was already exploring how humans might control intelligent robots before the term AI existed. Later, HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, could talk, reason, deceive, and kill, while The Terminator imagined a world in which machine intelligence turned against humanity.

Those stories did more than entertain audiences. They introduced questions that still shape the AI debate: Can a machine think? Could it become conscious? What happens if it becomes smarter than us? And would humans still be able to control it?

By the time ChatGPT brought generative AI to a mass audience, the public did not need an introduction to the basic idea. Decades of science, fiction, movies, and technological promises had already given “AI” a meaning far beyond its original academic definition.

Someone already got to “superintelligence”

Trump's preferred replacement also comes with history attached. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom helped bring “superintelligence” into the mainstream with his bestselling 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, although he had used the term years earlier, and the broader idea is older still.

Bostrom was describing something much more specific than AI in general. Superintelligence refers to an intellect that substantially exceeds the cognitive abilities of the best human minds across virtually every important field. His book explored how such a system might emerge and what could happen if humans were unable to control it.

Trump's executive order uses “Super Intelligence” much more broadly. For now, it covers technologies already included under the federal government's existing definition of AI, putting today's AI systems and a hypothetical intelligence beyond human capabilities under versions of the same name.

The Gulf of Mexico knows the feeling

AI is hardly the first familiar name Trump has decided could use an upgrade. Shortly after returning to office in 2025, he ordered the federal government to adopt “Gulf of America” for the Gulf of Mexico and restored Mount McKinley as the federal name for Denali.

That immediately brings to mind the 2012 comedy The Dictator, in which Admiral General Aladeen orders hundreds of words in the fictional Wadiyan language to be replaced with “Aladeen.” Among them are “positive” and “negative,” leading to the film's memorable scene in which a patient receives an HIV test result and cannot tell whether the news is good or bad.

Can anyone actually rename AI?

The federal government has considerable power over its own vocabulary. Agencies can write SI in reports, officials can use it in speeches, and government websites can replace one abbreviation with another. Outside Washington, the government has far less control over what people choose to call the technology.

AI is embedded in university departments, corporate strategies, legislation, investment products, job titles, and everyday conversations around the world. It appears in company names and product descriptions, and its meaning has been shaped by researchers, businesses, writers, filmmakers, and generations of people who encountered the idea long before today's AI boom.

None of that makes “artificial intelligence” a perfect name. Technology has changed enormously since four researchers chose those words in 1955, and the debate over what qualifies as intelligence remains unresolved. McCarthy and his colleagues, however, had one enormous advantage when they named the field: almost nobody had heard of it yet. Trump is trying to rename it precisely when almost everybody has.

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