If there’s one thing that Donald Trump and his sycophants love to do, it’s name or rebrand things to name them after hinself, make them sound more “extra”, or both. Consider:
- John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, often called “The Kennedy Center”
- The U.S. Institute of Peace
- The Department of War
- Palm Beach International Airport
- TrumpRx, a prescription drug website
- Passes for national parks
- Trump Accounts
- Renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario
- Trump-class battleships and F-47 fighter plane
…and the list goes on.
And now the idiocy meaningless renaming has come to tech:
The executive order, titled INAUGURATING THE ERA OF SUPER INTELLIGENCE, basically declares that “AI”, a term that we’ve been using since 1955 when John McCarthy coined it, should now be referred to as “Super Intelligence” or “SI” in executive-branch communications.
It says that agencies of the federal executive branch must use the new terms in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents and other non-statutory documents. Thankfully (because it would mean a lot of pointless work otherwise), existing regulations, presidential actions, contracts, grants and historical documents don’t have to be changed.
It also means that any content I make aimed at a U.S. government buyers or techies (especially tutorials, presentations, and documentation) will need to include the “SI” terms for both practical (for example, search terms) and political (“We call it ‘SI’ here, son.”). I’m already not looking forward to this.
For now, “SI” means exactly what “artificial intelligence” already means under 15 U.S.C. § 9401(3).; only the name has changed.
Sometime in the next 60 days, Michael Kratsios, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), will have to propose legislative language for a federal definition of SI. It’ll have to say whether that definition should modify or replace the statutory definition of AI, and include any conforming amendments and follow-on executive actions. If such changes are made, expect them to be dumb.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for the first kiss-ass to use the term in Trump’s presence: