No, It’s Not “Super Intelligence”

When Moses encountered the Lord God in the burning bush, he was told to go to the people of Israel to tell them that God heard their cry. Moses, understandably, did not think himself worthy of such a consequential task. So he asked to justify his mission by calling on the authority of the Lord:

If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, “The God of your fathers has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them? (Exodus 3:13)

Moses wanted to know the Lord’s name, because, like all ancients, he knew a person’s name reflected the essence of that person; it pointed to the underlying reality of who God was. Names, in other words, are important.

Our current President seems to agree, as can be seen by his obsession with renaming things. The Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America; Lake Ontario is now Lake America; the Department of Defense became the Department of War. And now, he wants us to rename “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence.”

Maybe these renamings are harmless; renaming a Gulf and a Lake are just ways to poke other countries during negotiations. While the renaming of the Department of War seems more ominous, it does reflect the reality of what the Department of Defense actually does.

However, the change from artificial intelligence to super intelligence isn’t harmless. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the most important and significant technology of our time—a misunderstanding that could have dire consequences.

Before I detail why, let me note the Orwellian aspects of this renaming. “Artificial intelligence” has been the term used since the advent of the technology. Coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956—just a few years after Alan Turing launched this field of study—it was used as part of a summer conference title on the subject: “Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.” In the years leading up to this conference, the technology was called a variety of names, the most common being “thinking machines” (Turing’s term). However, artificial intelligence (AI) stuck, and it became the acceptable term used by everyone from experts to laymen. 

To think a single man—even one as powerful as the President of the United States—can simply rename the most influential technology of an era boggles the mind. In Scripture, when something—or more commonly, someone—is renamed, it is done by God alone (Abram->Abraham; Jacob->Israel; Simon->Peter). No human person has such power, and a president attempting to do so has shades of 1984.

But the new name “super intelligence” is also a terrible name, regardless of its origins. Artificial intelligence became the norm for the technology’s name because it’s accurate: AI has the remarkable ability to mimic human intelligence. It can really seem at times as if there’s an intelligent being responding to your prompts. Yet, when you understand what it is doing under the hood, you realize that its abilities are not true intelligence, but simulated intelligence; i.e. artificial intelligence. Both words in the phrase “artificial intelligence,” therefore serve a useful and descriptive purpose.

“Super intelligence,” however, does the opposite. By applying the adjective “super,” this term implies—no, it states clearly—that we are referring to an actual intelligence, and one that is superior to human intelligence. However, AI is categorically different from human intelligence. As I’ve written about before, AI covers just a small slice of human intelligence. Yes, it can be amazing—even super—in that small slice, but it’s still a small aspect of the totality of intelligence. 

For example, AI doesn’t have tacit knowledge, such as feelings and emotions, or social knowledge, an implicit understanding of one’s cultural milieu. As Pope Leo wrote in Magnifica Humanitis, “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.”

In other words, not only is AI not “super intelligent,” but a newborn baby is far more intelligent than the most advanced artificial intelligence system today in wide areas of overall intelligence. And again, what intelligence AI has amounts to the mimicking of human intelligence, not the real thing.

“Artificial,” then, does a lot of heavy lifting in the term “artificial intelligence.” It keeps us grounded in reality as to what exactly AI is—an increasingly important distinction in an era of horrible philosophical errors that reduce man to nothing more than a sophisticated machine, instead of honoring him as an image of God. 

Continue, then, using the term artificial intelligence, no matter what the President might say, in order to keep the technology in its place: as a tool that helps humanity, and not as a new form of truly intelligent being that will one day replace us.

I don’t think President Trump understands artificial intelligence very well, but to be fair, neither do most people. We are astonished when we see AI do things we thought were relegated to science fiction, and we want to pile on superlatives. And it can do breathtaking things sometimes. But it’s vitally important we ground our understanding in this technology in proper philosophical and anthropological terms; “super intelligence” does the opposite. (To give a proper understanding of AI is exactly why I wrote my upcoming book The Catholic Guide to Artificial Intelligence and subtitled it “Preserving the Distinction Between Man and Machine.”) 

Sometimes Trump’s renaming spree can be relatively harmless. But in this case, Catholics and all those who care about the development of this powerful technology should not go along with him and call artificial intelligence “super intelligence.” Otherwise we deny reality and risk a future of man placing machines on the same level as—and even above—himself.