2026-10-11T16:00:44.935Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/11/politics/super-intelligence-trump-ai
A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
无法说服美国人接受他们厌恶的AI数据中心，唐纳德·特朗普总统转而动用了他认为总统拥有的绝对权力之一：重塑品牌。
但与“美国湖”、“美国湾”、军事基地或某座山脉不同，这次改名并非为了捞取政治资本，而是为了改变公众舆论。
特朗普上个月在联合国对各国领导人首次表示，“‘人工’这个词让智能听起来像假的，让它显得很虚假”。
特朗普在9月底签署一项行政命令后，美国政府一直在修改官方文件和网站。内阁部长和其他助手立刻启用了这个新术语。
埃隆·马斯克在X平台上表示，他会将旗下公司SpaceXAI更名为SpaceXSI，但这一更名目前尚未实施。
特朗普拒绝回答使用旧术语的问题。他在内布拉斯加州一场竞选集会上对支持者说，他今后会把“人工”这个他口中“丑陋”的词安在新闻媒体头上。
周四，特朗普在社交媒体上称，任何使用“人工智能”而非“超级智能”的人，都会被他的白宫视为“敌人！”
这一切可能很像特朗普的“编织”——他公开言论中漫无边际的思绪——但看着联邦政府的架构对许多美国人可能一笑置之的语义区别做出回应，也着实耐人寻味。
有些事是特朗普力所不及的——通过支出法案、重新命名肯尼迪中心、结束他对伊朗的战争——但他已经证明，总统有权更改名称。
这也表明，在他大力推动人工智能发展之际，他清楚数据中心不受欢迎以及公众普遍对AI存在担忧。
重塑品牌会有效吗？
Meta首席执行官马克·扎克伯格长期以来一直主张将AI视为超级智能。今年8月，他发表了一篇6000字的论文，阐述Meta将如何推进人工智能发展。在对未来的乐观评估中，他提到了超级智能的前景。当他提及AI时，通常是在回应那些他认为毫无根据的担忧。扎克伯格表示，Meta将致力于开源模式，让超级智能代理为每一位个体服务。
OpenAI首席执行官山姆·奥特曼在接受Politico的“解码”播客采访时表示，没有计划将公司更名为OpenSI。但他确实提到，业内人士使用“超级智能”这个术语已经有一段时间了。
“从最终结果来看，这或许是比‘人工智能’更好的说法，但‘超级智能’仍然有点低估了我认为正在发生的事情的规模，”奥特曼说。
奥特曼预测人们仍会使用AI一词，并质疑特朗普的品牌重塑能否实现改变人们对AI看法的目标。
“‘超级智能’听起来真的比‘人工智能’没那么吓人吗？”奥特曼问道。这还有待时间验证。
可以肯定的是，“超级智能”这个概念，尽管在特朗普看来更好听，但可以说与AI有所不同，对美国人来说应该同样令人不安。
“人工智能”一词起源于20世纪50年代，当时一群达特茅斯学院的教授举办了一次夏季会议，“基于这样的推测：学习或智能的任何其他特征，在原则上都可以被精确描述，从而制造出能够模拟它的机器”。
至少在学术领域，超级智能更像是人工智能或人工生成智能的下一阶段。当机器实现自主学习时，就会出现这种情况。
牛津大学哲学家尼克·博斯特伦曾就超级智能撰写过大量文章，包括2014年出版的《超级智能：路径、危险、策略》一书。
以下是博斯特伦1997年的一篇文章中对超级智能的最初定义：
当被问及如何看待特朗普的品牌重塑时，博斯特伦表示，从技术角度来看，AI传统上是“一个宽泛的总括性术语，涵盖机器智能信息处理的所有形式”。
我们所说的一切，从谷歌搜索、电子邮件垃圾邮件过滤器、当前的各类AI，到“假设性的未来更强大的AI”。
“如果想用‘超级智能’这个新词涵盖所有这一切，那有点牵强，或许可以说我的垃圾邮件过滤器就是超级智能，”博斯特伦告诉CNN。
他说，在AI的理论演进中，下一步是AGI，即通用人工智能，指的是拥有与人类相同的学习和推理能力的系统，奥特曼称这种系统可能已经出现。
“‘超级智能’原本是指这种假设性的未来人工智能形式，它不仅能在所有认知领域与人类匹敌，还能从根本上超越人类，”博斯特伦解释道。
这正是AI“末日论者”所恐惧的东西。但特朗普完全无法理解机器竟然能胜过他。
“AI唯一需要的管控或‘护栏’，就是一位强大且聪明（高智商！）的总统，而美国恰恰拥有这样的总统，而且多得是！”特朗普在9月份写道，他反对任何形式的AI监管。
博斯特伦既写过超级智能的潜在陷阱，也写过它在改善和延长人类寿命方面的巨大潜力。但通过更改名称，特朗普似乎只是想掌控叙事。
博斯特伦并不认为这是个坏主意。
“如何使用英语不由我决定，”他说，“我是说，这或许能促进我的书销量。”
他确实看到了使用新术语的修辞优势：为“超级智能”辩护比为“人工智能”辩护更容易。
“如果你定义我们已经拥有了超级智能，而且它还没有引发任何灾难，那有什么大不了的？然后你就需要引入一些新术语来指代这种假设性的未来、甚至更强大的能力。”
特朗普深谙反复言说就能让公众接受的道理。他公开演讲时几乎总会重复同样的话术，比如“假新闻”、“激进左翼”民主党，或是无论事实如何，吹嘘自己的领导有多出色。
在联合国，特朗普将他的品牌重塑比作“全球变暖”的演变，他说“全球变暖被重新定义为气候变化，因为地球在变冷而非变暖，而且没有人死亡”。
这并不完全符合事实，任何关注过近年来气候变暖的人都不难证实这一点。
Trump really wants to make ‘super intelligence’ happen. Is it going to happen?
2026-10-11T16:00:44.935Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/11/politics/super-intelligence-trump-ai
A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
Unable to convince Americans to embrace the AI data centers they hate, President Donald Trump is instead exercising the one power he believes is absolute in the presidency: a rebrand.
But unlike Lake America, the Gulf of America, military bases or a mountain, this change is about altering public opinion rather than scoring political points.
Trump first told fellow world leaders at the United Nations last month that “use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake.”
After Trump signed an executive order in late September, the US government has been changing official documents and websites. Cabinet secretaries and other aides immediately used the new term.
Elon Musk said on X that he would change the name of his company from SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, although that particular change has not yet occurred.
Trump has refused to answer questions that use the old term. He told supporters at a campaign rally in Nebraska that he would henceforth repurpose “artificial” — an “ugly” word, he said — for the news media.
On Thursday, the president said on social media that anyone who uses the term artificial intelligence instead of super intelligence will be viewed by his White House as “THE ENEMY!”
All of this might feel very much like Trump’s “weave” — the mental meanderings of Trump’s public statements — but it has also been fascinating to watch the infrastructure of the federal government respond to what many Americans might write off as a semantic distinction.
There are things that are out of Trump’s power — passing spending bills, renaming the Kennedy Center, ending his war against Iran — but he has shown that presidents have power to change names.
It’s also evidence he knows the unpopularity of data centers and concerns about AI in general at a time when he is a major booster of AI.
Will a rebrand be effective?
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long pushed to view AI as superintelligence. In August, he published a 6,000-word treatise about how Meta would approach AI. In rose assessments of the future, he referred to the promise of superintelligence. When he referred to AI, it was usually in reference to what he argued were unfounded worries. Zuckerberg said Meta will be committed to an open source model that provides for superintelligent agents working on behalf of every individuals.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico’s “Decoded” podcast there are no plans to change the name of his company to OpenSI. But he did say that people in the industry have been using the term superintelligence for a while.
It might be a better term, ultimately, than artificial intelligence, but “still sort of understates the magnitude of what I think is happening,” Altman said.
Altman predicted people would still use the term AI and questioned whether Trump’s rebrand would accomplish its goal of changing people’s opinions of AI.
“Does superintelligence sound obviously less scary to people than artificial intelligence?” Altman wondered. Time will tell.
What is definitely true is that the concept of superintelligence, while it sounds better in Trump’s view, is arguably distinct from AI and should be no less intimidating to Americans.
The term artificial intelligence has its roots in the 1950s, when a group of Dartmouth professors held a summertime conference “on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”
Superintelligence, at least academically, seems more like the next step of artificial intelligence, or artificial generative intelligence. That happens when the machines learn.
The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has written extensively about superintelligence, including in the 2014 book “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.”
Here’s how Bostrum first defined superintelligence in a 1997 essay:
Asked how he views Trump’s rebrand, Bostrum said that from a technical perspective AI has traditionally “been this wide umbrella term that refers to every form of intelligent information processing in machines.”
We’re talking everything from the Google searches and email spam filters, the current crop of AIs and “hypothetical future more powerful ones.”
“If the idea is to use the new word superintelligence to cover all of that, it’s a little bit of a stretch, maybe, to call my spam filter a superintelligence,” Bostrum told CNN.
In the theoretical evolution of AI, what comes next, he said is AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which refers to a system that has the same kind of learning and reasoning as humans, something Atman says might already have occurred.
“Superintelligence was reserved for this sort of hypothetical future form of artificial intelligence that not only matched but radically exceeded humans across all cognitive domain,” according to Bostrum.
That is exactly the thing that frightens the AI “doomers.” But it is incomprehensible to Trump that the machines could outwit him.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote in September, arguing against any sort of AI regulation.
Bostrum has written both about potential pitfalls of superintelligence as well as the enormous potential to improve and extend human life. But by changing the name, Trump seems to just want to control the narrative.
Bostrum doesn’t necessarily think it’s a bad idea.
“It’s not up to me to decide how English language should be used,” he said. “I mean, it’s good for my book sales, I guess.”
He does see the rhetorical argument for a new term: It’s harder to argue against super intelligence than artificial intelligence.
“If you define superintelligence as we already have superintelligence and it hasn’t caused any catastrophe yet, then what’s the big deal? And you then would need to introduce some new term to refer to this like hypothetical future capability that’s even more powerful.”
Trump knows a thing or two about saying things so much that they take hold in the public. He rarely speaks in public without repeating the same talking points about “fake” news, the “radical left” Democrats, or about how wonderful his own leadership has been, regardless of what the facts are.
At the UN, Trump compared his rebrand to the evolution of “global warming,” which he said was “reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”
That’s not exactly what happened, as anyone paying attention to the warming climate in recent years can pretty easily confirm.
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