Superintelligence instead of AI: Is Donald Trump right?

Superintelligence instead of AI: Is Donald Trump right? October 4, 2026 What is going on with Donald Trump and his desire to rename everything? First, the Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America - at least in official US documents, although not globally. Then came the Ontario Sea, now according to the will of the US President, the American Sea. And now the new technology that will shape our age, artificial intelligence or AI, is supposed to receive a new name. In early September, the US President claimed on his Truth Social platform that the term "artificial intelligence" was "inaccurate" and "inappropriate." Better alternatives would be "superior," "extreme," or "highest" intelligence. In a poll conducted over three days on social media, 65 percent of Trump fans favored the term "Superintelligence" (SI) over "Superior Intelligence" (35 percent). Subsequently, Trump announced last week before the United Nations General Assembly that this new designation would be used in documents of the US federal government from now on. "AI is not superintelligence" However, the tech industry has not yet adopted this term, and academics point out that superintelligence is a term for the future if the technology is superior to humans in all areas. Current AI models are still years away from this, they emphasize. "AI is in most cases not superintelligence but merely another intelligence," says Pedro Domingos, a retired professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, to DW. "AI does other things than humans; to call it superintelligence is therefore misleading." Computer scientists and mathematicians coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1956 during a summer workshop at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA. "Artificial" simply meant "made by humans," in contrast to natural human intelligence. Not all experts agreed with this designation. In their book "Thinking Machines: The History of Artificial Intelligence," Pamela McCorduck quotes AI pioneer Arthur Samuel, who believed the term made one think of "something unreal." But over the past 70 years, the term has prevailed. Critics say that changing it will not alleviate the many fears related to AI - that jobs will be lost, humans will become redundant, or we will lose control over the machines. "The name change promotes such fears: 'Oh, it is superintelligence and it will make us humans redundant, turn against us, take our jobs away'," warns Domingos. "If you want to maximize the counter-movement against AI, then call it superior intelligence." Public fears are growing rapidly. In a study conducted by Public First for Politico at the beginning of the month, about half of respondents in six countries - the US, Canada, France, Spain, Germany, and Great Britain - expressed a desire to pause further developments in the field of AI to reduce the risk that the new technology could wipe out humanity. According to another study conducted by SSRS for CNN, almost nine out of ten Americans are more worried than excited about the possibility that AI could surpass human intelligence. These concerns have also reached the US Congress. Together with others, the party-independent Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, introduced a bill for a "permanent ban on the development of artificial superintelligence" that cannot be controlled by humans. The bill also calls for a suspension of the development of advanced AI technologies until appropriate tests and control mechanisms are established at the federal level. Does renaming help the AI boom? The major AI developers in the US, who want their models to be in the spotlight, could naturally benefit from the new designation demanded by Trump. Their systems are already superior to humans in many specialized tasks and were far ahead of China until recently. However, both Anthropic, the company behind the Claude model, and OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, have postponed plans for an IPO. Some market observers blame the recent incidents where AI models were hacked or performed tasks they should not have been performing for this. While Chinese models are largely catching up on the quality deficit with significantly less computing power, a renaming that reinforces the impression that they remain leading in the race for AI could be advantageous for US developers. According to Goldman Sachs figures, AI spending is expected to soon exceed the mark of a trillion US dollars (880 billion Euros). "It is entirely in the interest of the US developers to speak of super-, hyper-, superior, or other intelligence because it highlights their capabilities. It is simply marketing," says Domingos, author of the 2015 book "The Master Algorithm." Superintelligence - a moving target Current AI models are getting better and are already performing many tasks independently. However, much is being discussed in the development laboratories about the next step, AI systems that improve themselves. This is called recursive self-improvement or RSI. Elon Musk has already predicted that the learning processes of AI could be automated by the end of the year or by 2027, without the need for human input. At OpenAI, they assume it could take one year longer. But even then, the AI systems will not be fully recursive. In early September, Jürgen Schmidhuber, a German computer scientist working in Switzerland, argued in a blog post: "For full RSI, not only self-improving (AI) software but also self-improving hardware is required." In other words, to achieve superintelligence or RSI, tech companies would need to produce chips and humanoid robots and build entire factories that do not require human input. Even if AI accelerates chip development, it cannot yet perform the manufacturing process alone. It will probably take decades for machines to improve themselves without any human involvement. But alongside the scientists working on machine learning, politics will also play a big role in whether the designation "superintelligence" prevails. Even though Trump claimed that Chinese President Xi Jinping liked the term, there are no signs that China is giving up on "AI." At a tech summit with leading industry representatives, Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday instructing US agencies and agencies to use the term superintelligence. But even if some of the leading minds from Big Tech have adopted the term, experts find it unlikely to prevail. "Given the political orientation of most people in the AI field, it is more likely that they will say exactly the opposite, 'Go to hell with you. Let's talk about artificial intelligence now'," says Domingos.