President Donald Trump’s war in Iran drags on, his pledge to bring down prices on day one appears to have backfired, and his record-low approval ratings are dragging down his party ahead of the midterm elections. But one Trump initiative that is going exactly according to plan: getting some of the world’s richest CEOs to help him rebrand “artificial intelligence.”

Last month, with an ever-growing number of Americans worried that AI might kill us all, the president summoned tech executives to the White House to make a big announcement: "artificial intelligence” is out. “Super Intelligence” is in.  Despite the term “AI” being in use for more than 70 years, government agencies will no longer recognize it.

I’m skeptical that the White House is a repository of superintelligence, in part because “United States” was misspelled on the president’s official announcement. But unlike, say, Lake America, “super intelligence” has largely caught on—at least among the people building it. Jeff Bezos publicly blessed the rebrand. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, was quick to get on board. During a SpaceX’s earnings call this week, Elon Musk used “super intelligence” in his very first sentence, and at least nine times after that. 

It remains to be seen whether those of us less reliant on government contracts and favorable regulatory decisions join the movement to make super intelligence happen. But as a former presidential speechwriter, I won’t argue with President Trump’s broader instinct that words matter. Especially when those words are being used to describe something novel, controversial, and almost certain to have consequences for all eight-plus billion people on earth. 

In fact, that’s the biggest problem with the White House’s big rebrand—it goes in entirely the wrong direction. I would argue that our shared language around artificial intelligence already places far too much emphasis on intelligence, and far too........

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