Donald Trump's current hyperfocus is... artificial intelligence 👀. The president of the United States has insisted that he wants to change the name of the technology to "superintelligence (SI)".
In his speech to the UN General Assembly last month, Trump stated that "the name artificial intelligence makes it sound like it is fake." He also said that "from now on, all documents in the US and, I hope, around the world, will use the name Superintelligence".
Before deciding on "Superintelligence", Trump even opened a poll on his social network, Truth Social, with the options "Superior Intelligence (IS)", "Extreme Intelligence (IE)" and "Supreme Intelligence (IS)", translated into Portuguese.
Two days later, he ran a new poll, this time with "Superintelligence" and "Superior Intelligence". In none of the posts, did he explain how the change would be made or whether the technology market agreed with the change.
And there's more: Trump then caused controversy by stating that he would treat anyone who used the term "artificial intelligence" instead of "Superintelligence" as an "enemy."
What does Trump want?
Those who don't follow technology may have only heard about AI recently, especially with the emergence of ChatGPT. But the concept has existed for more than 70 years and technology has been present in everyday life for a long time, after undergoing major transformations in recent decades.
Therefore, changing the name of the AI is not as simple as it seems. According to Anderson Soares, considered the most influential Brazilian in AI, the concept of intelligence itself still does not have a precise definition, both in biological and natural sciences and in the field of technology.
"What we call artificial intelligence today is related to the ability of machines to perform tasks that we associate with human intelligence", says Soares, who is also founder and professor at the Center for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (CEIA), at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG).
"The objective of changing the name seems to me to be much more of a counterattack on the issue of paralyzing the development of AI. It seems more like a political act than actually something constructive and that contributes to what is happening in terms of development", he adds.
Cleber Zanchettin, professor of Computer Engineering at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) and specialist in AI, draws attention to Trump's speech at the UN.
"First, he said 'welcome to the new world of superintelligence' and finished with 'let's see if this will work'. This reveals a marketing ploy to attract attention, with no practical effect," he said.
For professor and researcher Allan Pscheidt, Trump's proposal also does not appear to be a change in the scientific or technical definition of technology, but a demonstration of US power and sovereignty in the international AI scenario.
"We are experiencing something similar to what happened in the race to the Moon and the space race. We are now moving on to the race for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)", says Pscheidt.
"When Trump comes up with the idea of coining the term 'superintelligence', he is warning the world that the US will achieve AGI very soon and that, in doing so, it will demonstrate its technological sovereignty," he states.
AGI (acronym in English for "Artificial General Intelligence") is the term used to describe an AI capable of performing a wide variety of intellectual tasks at a level similar to or greater than that of humans. Allan points out that, to date, there is no scientific proof that superintelligence already exists.
Cleber Zanchettin, from UFPE, warns that, as a large part of the population still has little knowledge about technology, products with the AI label already face some rejection or fear in the market.
"Introducing a term like 'superintelligence' or 'supreme intelligence' can sound like a threat to humans and increase public rejection," explains Zanchettin.
"Few countries and populations have truly embraced the technology, and most people are still trying to understand what basic AI is and how it works."
More than half of Brazilians (52%) say they are more concerned than excited about the advancement of artificial intelligence, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.
In the US, the perception is similar: about nine in 10 Americans say they are more worried than excited about the possibility of AI one day surpassing human intelligence, according to a CNN survey released in September.
Where did the term AI come from?
The term AI was born from the work of researchers from different areas, such as engineering, mathematics and statistics. They sought to understand how to create machines capable of demonstrating some form of reasoning and intelligence similar to that of human beings, explained Zanchettin.
The name was formally defined in mid-1955, in the United States, and emerged from the work of researchers such as John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon and Nathaniel Rochester, explained the professor.
"They needed a nomenclature for research that mixed mathematics, engineering and statistics to create machines capable of displaying reasoning, something that did not fit into traditional software at the time," said Zanchettin.
But research into machines capable of thinking began before that. Between the 1940s and 1950s, mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing was already studying this possibility, explains researcher Allan Pscheidt.
At the same time, in 1948, mathematician Norbert Wiener created the term "cybernetics" to study systems capable of using information about their own actions to adjust their functioning.
According to Pscheidt, it was in this context that John McCarthy created the expression "artificial intelligence" in 1955. The choice also sought to differentiate this field of research from cybernetics, focusing on reasoning and the autonomy of machines.
With the advancement and popularization of technology, AI has become part of people's daily lives, in features such as facial recognition in banks, semi-autonomous cars, drones, smart speakers and cell phone cameras.
More recently, starting in 2017, generative AI gained strength, which gave rise to tools such as ChatGPT and is capable of creating texts, images, videos and music.
In the end, for Anderson Soares, "technological waves usually go through relatively predictable phases: first they provoke fear and distrust; then come acceptance and enchantment; and, over time, the technology becomes understood and stops seeming like something extraordinary."
