Big news! It seems that Donald Trump has scheduled his “October surprise” for the end of September, and has announced that at 5:00 p.m. ET he will sign an executive order that bids fair to alter the course of human history, as well as the trajectory of the November midterms.
Yes, that’s right: Trump is “officially” renaming artificial intelligence “Super Intelligence.” For those paying attention to Trump’s various Truth Social ramblings (readers, forgive me – it’s my job), his obsession with this particular bit of semantics has been a recent hobgoblin, and I guess now he’s decided he’s not just president of the United States, but Bryan Garner as well.
Needless to say: This changes everything.
What does it even mean to “officially” rename a term coined as part of common usage? “AI” isn’t a brand name, after all, like “Kleenex” or “Xerox.” It means nothing, of course — the quintessentially useless Trump “vanity gesture,” like renaming the Gulf of Mexico or Lake Ontario for attention. The hapless French have always been the gold standard for this sort of officious attempt to govern the demotic — go look up what the ridiculous “authentically French” word for “computer” is someday — what with the Académie française futilely dictating the “proper” French tongue to the masses. (It’s wasted effort in any event because, whether spoken in the Île-de-France or the most pudknuckerish part of Provence, the French language invariably sounds like drunkenly slurred ribbiting.)
I predict Trump will have even less success in shifting the American vernacular than the French have had. There’s really no point even bothering with commenting on the desperate superfluousness of Trump’s entire gesture; Trump’s ill-chosen war with the media is proving to bite at him harder, and faster, than even I expected, and he’s now just tossing random PR darts at the wall, hoping something will get him to lead the evening news.