The White House has discovered a solution to the AI ethics crisis that Silicon Valley missed: better branding. According to people close to the president, the administration is pushing to rename artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” — a shift that will reportedly solve concerns about bias, labor displacement, and whether machines will eventually decide humans are inefficient.
The logic is sound, if you squint. After all, nobody worries about a “super” anything. Super Bowls are fun. Superman saves people. A super intelligence surely would not hallucinate medical diagnoses or train itself on stolen artwork. The term practically inoculates itself against criticism through sheer adjective power.
Experts, predictably, are less convinced. Linguists point out that renaming something does not change what it does — a fact that has held true since we stopped calling inflation “transitory.” Ethicists note that the core problems with AI systems (they amplify existing biases, they displace workers, they sometimes produce confidently wrong answers) have nothing to do with what we call them. A super intelligence that denies you a loan based on your zip code is still denying you a loan.
But the proposal reveals something real: the desperate hope that naming something differently will make us feel better about it. It is the policy equivalent of rebranding a failing product. And it might actually work — at least until the super intelligence starts making decisions nobody likes. Then we will need a new name again.