Regardless of your politics, there’s something about President Donald Trump we can all agree on: When the man wants to come up with a nickname for someone or something … let him cook.
Unfortunately, “Super Intelligence,” his new name for artificial intelligence, is a rare miss.
I have a better idea.
After a lunch with AI leaders, Trump held a press briefing with Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others to announce an executive order stating that the federal government will now refer to “artificial intelligence” as “super intelligence”.
“The word super is the best word of all, and it’s the simplest,” Trump explained.
You can imagine why Trump thinks the term “AI” has a bad rap. Polls consistently show that Americans hate AI. The reasons are obvious: People worry it will take jobs, replace human creativity, and no one wants to live near data centers.
Oh yeah, and there’s the whole thing about AI possibly killing us all. And don’t even get us started on the AI-generated deli menus.
Trump isn’t the only person who thinks AI might need a more cuddly, friendly makeover. Meta’s Muse has a fuzzy wuzzy blobby Labubu-esque lil’ sweetiepie animated character to represent the AI agent. (Please note: you can change the character on Muse to whatever you want; I made mine a picture of Mark Zuckerberg so I don’t ever forget who I’m giving my data to while I’m using it.)
But why is “super intelligence” the wrong choice to replace “artificial intelligence?” Because the problem isn’t the word “artificial” — it’s “intelligence.”
Intelligence implies human thinking — and the idea that AI or SI is doing “intelligence” is, frankly, insulting to our (human) intelligence. Yes, we know it’s artificial. That’s fine. It being super isn’t any better.
Which is why I propose a whole new term: Robo Doodad, or R.D. That hits two main points: it’s robo, and it’s a doodad. Robo Doodad isn’t going to take your job. No one’s going to try to marry their robo doodad chat. Building massive doodad centers sounds cool and fun.
Trump’s instincts here to rename AI are spot-on, but he’s not going far enough. We should be accelerationists when it comes to the new name, rebuilding the term from first principles.
We must rename AI as Robo Doodad.
