Trump executive order renames AI "Super Intelligence"

The term "artificial intelligence" dates back to 1956, when John McCarthy suggested it at a Dartmouth College meeting. It stuck so thoroughly that a Google Scholar search returns roughly 7,420,000 results for it. Trump's objection is linguistic: he says "artificial" makes intelligence sound fake, and after the lunch he called "artificial intelligence" an inappropriate term. That leap does not track with McCarthy's original intent, which was to distinguish human intelligence from the machine version. The episode also fits a pattern described by Jacob Weisberg, author of Profiles in Cowardice, who sees it as a classic loyalty test designed to see whether powerful people will demean themselves to avoid the president's wrath. The executives passed that test, but at a cost: their silence allowed Trump to tell reporters the name had been changed by "the biggest, the, smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world." Whether the rebrand holds may depend less on the order itself than on how long the companies can avoid drawing attention while the next administration takes shape.