Trump Declares War on Artificial Intelligence. The Artificial Part, That Is.

The United States has a national debt exceeding $38 trillion, a complicated relationship with China, wars and geopolitical crises demanding attention, immigration disputes, healthcare costs, and a long list of problems that cannot be solved by presidential proclamation. Fortunately, President Donald Trump has identified another urgent national priority: artificial intelligence has the wrong name. Not the technology, not its reliability, not the enormous electricity requirements of data centers, not the potential destruction of millions of jobs. The name. Apparently, the greatest obstacle to American technological supremacy is two letters of the alphabet.

On September 29, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace the term Artificial Intelligence, or AI, with Super Intelligence, or SI. His explanation was characteristically simple. He dislikes the word artificial because it sounds fake, while the technology itself is powerful and impressive. Therefore, it deserves a more flattering description. By October 8, the linguistic campaign had escalated considerably. Trump declared that anyone continuing to use the old terminology was considered “THE ENEMY!” by the White House. Not merely mistaken, outdated, or insufficiently enthusiastic. The enemy. America has apparently reached the stage where using an established scientific term can become an act of political defiance.

There is a small technical problem with this presidential breakthrough. Artificial intelligence and superintelligence are not interchangeable concepts. AI describes a broad category of computational systems, from relatively simple pattern-recognition software to advanced language models. Superintelligence traditionally refers to a hypothetical level of machine intelligence that substantially exceeds human capabilities across virtually every intellectual domain. Researchers have spent decades distinguishing these concepts, but decades of scientific terminology are no match for a presidential preference expressed in capital letters. Under the new branding, apparently, a chatbot that invents legal precedents can be promoted to superintelligence without the inconvenience of becoming any more intelligent. The software stays exactly the same. Only the marketing department gets an upgrade.

The spectacle becomes even more entertaining when the machinery of government begins implementing the change. The Justice Department has instructed employees to adopt the new terminology in official communications and, where appropriate, court filings. Imagine the administrative effort: government websites, reports, policy papers, presentations, internal documents, and correspondence requiring revisions because the president has decided that one adjective is insufficiently complimentary. Somewhere in Washington, highly paid professionals are presumably spending working hours replacing AI with SI while the underlying technology continues making precisely the same mistakes it made yesterday. This is bureaucracy performing a vocabulary exercise at taxpayer expense.

Naturally, the technology industry has discovered the strategic importance of agreeing with the president. Elon Musk announced that his company’s AI operation would adopt the SI terminology, while other executives have begun embracing the new language. There is something wonderfully revealing about billionaires who spend their careers celebrating disruptive innovation suddenly discovering the virtues of linguistic obedience. The companies that promise to revolutionize human civilization apparently cannot resist a good old-fashioned Washington rebranding exercise. Perhaps the next technological breakthrough will be software that automatically applauds executive orders. It would probably find a substantial market.

There is, of course, a political logic beneath the comedy. Artificial intelligence has developed an increasingly uncomfortable public image. People worry about employment, surveillance, misinformation, data centers, energy consumption, and the concentration of technological power in a handful of corporations. Super Intelligence sounds more exciting, more optimistic, more American, and considerably easier to sell. The rebranding offers a way to change the emotional packaging without first resolving the difficult questions inside it. A technology that threatens your job sounds unpleasant. A technology called Super Intelligence sounds like something that should arrive wearing a cape. The president is hardly the first politician to discover that changing the vocabulary is easier than changing reality.

But the deeper absurdity is the presidential attention devoted to the matter. The United States is competing with China in advanced semiconductors, computing infrastructure, energy systems, robotics, and military applications of artificial intelligence. Those are serious challenges involving enormous investment, engineering expertise, industrial capacity, and long-term strategic planning. Whether the acronym contains an A or an S will not determine who wins that competition. Chinese engineers are unlikely to suspend their research while American federal agencies update their PowerPoint presentations. Beijing may even appreciate the distraction. It is difficult to imagine a more convenient geopolitical development than watching Washington debate adjectives while everyone else concentrates on algorithms.

And then there is the philosophical question Trump has accidentally introduced. If artificial intelligence must be renamed because the word artificial is unflattering, what happens to artificial hearts, artificial limbs, artificial satellites, and artificial sweeteners? Must artificial hearts become Super Hearts? Should synthetic materials be renamed Supreme Materials? Perhaps artificial Christmas trees should be declared enemies of the holiday season. Once the federal government assumes responsibility for protecting nouns from insufficiently enthusiastic adjectives, there is practically no limit to the opportunities for executive intervention.

The irony is that AI itself could probably have explained why the proposed terminology is scientifically misleading in a few seconds. It could have described the historical development of the field, distinguished narrow AI from artificial general intelligence and superintelligence, and produced a perfectly serviceable briefing for the president. But that would require consulting the technology rather than renaming it. And where is the political excitement in that?

Trump has always understood the power of branding. Buildings, hotels, products, political slogans, and public controversies have all been subjected to the same instinct: control the name, control the narrative. Applying that instinct to one of the most consequential technologies in human history is therefore entirely consistent with his public style. The difference is that a hotel can be renamed without confusing an entire scientific discipline. A president can order federal agencies to change their vocabulary, but he cannot order a technological breakthrough into existence.

Perhaps tomorrow the White House will announce that inflation is henceforth Prosperity Adjustment, the national debt is Deferred Wealth, and unemployment is Recreational Freedom. The economy would look magnificent on paper. Every problem could be solved with a new acronym, every setback transformed into a triumph, every inconvenient reality defeated by a better slogan.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence will continue developing, companies will continue investing, researchers will continue arguing about what their systems can actually do, and Americans will continue facing problems considerably more tangible than an objectionable adjective.

The president of the United States has decided that AI should be called SI. The executive order is signed, the bureaucracy is responding, and the terminology police have been alerted.

Now, perhaps, somebody could return to running the country.