This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

President Trump has in recent days doubled down on a September executive order, rebranding Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Super Intelligence (SI). Those unwilling to embrace his preferred terminology — “the highly accepted new and more accurate term,” as he described it on Truth Social — would be deemed “THE ENEMY!” The whole thing may seem on first glance to be silly or innocuous. In reality, however, the rebranding of AI to SI isn’t just about nomenclature. 

Trump has waded into a debate on what the ultimate outcome of AI may be: one in which the world, because of AI, becomes a utopia, or one in which the world becomes a dystopia due to AI.

Beneath the debate over artificial intelligence sits a bigger question about where the technology is going. “Superintelligence” marks the point where AI stops merely matching or beating humans at specific tasks. It describes machines that outthink the best human minds in nearly every field, from reasoning and planning to scientific discovery and problem-solving.

Silicon Valley has broadly divided into two schools over what that transition would mean. On one side are the techno-optimists and accelerationists, represented by figures such as Marc Andreessen and, in a more qualified way, Peter Thiel,........

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