Seventy years ago last summer, a group of scientists met at Dartmouth College to discuss a wild idea—that machines might one day be capable of human-like thought processes. One of those scientists, John McCarthy, had suggested a name for the new field: artificial intelligence. It stuck. When you search Google Scholar for “artificial intelligence,” approximately 7,420,000 results appear. The term is utterly ubiquitous. Everyone understands it. Even for people who despise AI, the least of their worries is what we call it.
Well, not everyone. Somehow, President Donald J. Trump developed a distaste for the term, and when he doesn’t like something, he feels free to issue an edict against it. In a September 23 speech at the United Nations, he hinted that he might want to do away with the term “artificial intelligence.” His rant seemed like bluster, even for someone with a penchant for renaming gulfs, lakes, and centers for the arts. Renaming an entire field of study and America’s most pivotal industry? This week, at a White House lunch with top AI leaders, he actually pulled the trigger with an executive order declaring that “artificial intelligence” was now a verboten coinage. Instead, the government will call it “Super Intelligence.” Clearly the president expects the private sector to follow suit.
To their shame, the lords of AI meekly acquiesced. From this point on, they will presumably be known as the lords of SI.
One can’t help but see this as the ultimate presidential flex—for all the executives’ trillions of dollars and all their actual intelligence, the alpha in the room was the guy with the orange skin. Changing a name might seem like a minor matter compared to the enormity of constraining a potentially catastrophic technology. But to this crowd, artificial intelligence is much more than a bunch of letters strung together. It’s their foundation. Their identity. When they were kids reading science fiction books under the covers, the term ignited their imaginations.They built or transformed their companies in service of AI, and it’s just about all they’ve talked about for the past four years.
Yet when the president used his lunch soiree to win their approval for his wacky idea to undo 70 years of history, apparently not a single person in the room expressed an objection. Not Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Greg Brockman, Alex Karp, or Elon Musk.
Jacob Weisberg, author of the recent book Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, views the episode as a classic Trump loyalty test, meant to assess if otherwise powerful people will demean themselves to curry the president’s favor and avoid his wrath. If you pass the loyalty test, you fail the backbone test. “The only way to resist this kind of thing is by acting collectively,” says Weisberg. “If all of those guys had just said, ‘We’ll agree to the terms of the self-regulation, but we don’t accept [the name change], what would he have done?”