President Donald Trump used his address to the UN General Assembly in New York to give artificial intelligence a new name. From now on, he said, US government documents would call it 'super intelligence', because 'artificial' made the technology sound fake. The rebrand grabbed the headlines, but the policy sat in the sentences around it.
As Lance Ulanoff argued in TechRadar, the real message was that Trump does not want the technology regulated, at home or abroad. Trump told delegates that US documents, 'and hopefully the world's', would switch to what he called the 'much more accurate term', according to accounts from Fox News and Futurism. He also framed the field as a race, saying 'whoever wins super intelligence wins' and claiming a large lead over China, Fox News reported.
The word 'superintelligence' is not a neutral choice. In AI research, it usually describes a hypothetical system that outperforms humans across the board, not the chatbots and image generators in use today. It is also the industry's favourite pitch, with Mark Zuckerberg and companies like Meta and OpenAI using the term to describe where they say the technology is heading.
Trump's regulatory message was blunter than the branding. He said the US would encourage the technology and 'not rein it in', a line CNBC also pulled from the speech. He paired that with a rejection of international oversight, saying the US would not accept any global mechanism to control the technology.
The speech landed days after Geoffrey Hinton told senators at a closed briefing convened by Senator Bernie Sanders that Congress had 'maybe a year, but not much more than a year' to act on AI regulation. Hinton's reasoning, NBC News reported, is that 'AI is designing better AI'. Congress has not found its urgency yet, with three Senate AI bills having no timetable for a vote.
Trump did say the technology called for some care, according to TechRadar's account of the speech. However, none of the accounts describe him proposing a way to provide it, which leaves the new name as the most concrete AI measure he announced.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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