President Donald Trump announced on Sept. 29 that he was planning to officially rebrand “artificial intelligence” to "super intelligence" in all government documents with an executive order.
Trump, who had teased the new term at the United Nations General Assembly
last week, was speaking at the launch of America.gov, a new website being touted as an AI-powered one-stop-shop to access federal services and information.“This kind of innovation in government is just a preview of what is possible with super intelligence, or SI, and that's the official name in the United States,” he said as he unveiled the new website at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC. “I'll be signing a very powerful executive order.”
“Because when you say artificial
intelligence, it's artificial,” he said. “This is extreme intelligence. It's superior intelligence. It's supreme also intelligence. But the word super is the best word of all and it's the simplest.”
Trump has rejected calls from industry leaders and researchers to proceed with caution on the development of artificial intelligence.
Even rival CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI recently warned that cutting-edge AI models could be dangerous and need to be independently regulated and tested before being released.
“Like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote earlier this month. “They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.”
Open AI CEO Sam Altman published an op-ed calling for governments, not AI labs, to set the rules for artificial intelligence. OpenAI said in July that an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company.
Trump has described the concerns as a hoax and called himself a “hoax buster.”
“I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax — That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!,” he wrote in a social media post on Sept. 14.
“Don’t kill the Golden Goose!” he warned in another post.
On Sept. 29, he once again expressed his enthusiasm and optimism for the technology as he touted the America.gov website.
“This is one more example of why I will never stifle the growth of technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution," said Trump. "This is why the SI super intelligence is, they're saying, bigger than the industrial revolution, far bigger than the internet, not even close. And we see it and we can't stifle it."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump says order will give AI a new name in government documents
