The name is a power move

The renaming has been going on for a while. The Pentagon is now, by order, the Department of War. A peace institute in Washington carries a president’s name over the door. This week the habit reached the technology most of us actually use: on 29 September, by executive order, the United States told its departments to stop writing “artificial intelligence” and start writing “super intelligence.” SI.

Within a day, something odd happened. Registrations of Slovenia’s national web address, .si, overtook .ai — the two-letter code of a small Balkan country, snapped up by the tens of thousands by people betting the new label sticks. More than 46,000 in September, against about 3,500 the month before. Not companies. Speculators. The same thing happened to .ai a couple of years ago, when a tiny Caribbean island’s domain became the address of the AI boom by pure accident of spelling. We are, it seems, naming the defining technology of the age roughly the way we name hurricanes — by proclamation — and then selling the merchandise.

It would be easy to laugh and scroll on. I think it’s worth a minute longer, because the name is not nothing. The name is an argument about rank.

Look at the options doing the rounds. “Super intelligence” — above you. “Master intelligence,” which I’ve heard floated — over you. The labs got there first: Meta’s division is called Superintelligence Labs; the company Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI to build is called Safe Superintelligence. The word the industry keeps reaching for is the one that puts the machine on a higher rung than the person using it. Then there’s the warmer camp — “companion intelligence,” the thing beside you, a friend of sorts. And the maximalists, who think it has outgrown any label: omni-intelligence, everywhere, in everything.

Every one of those is a claim about where the thing sits in relation to you. Super and master hold it over your head. Companion sits it at your side and gently implies you owe it something. Omni says don’t even try to place it. And a government decree does what renaming always does — renaming is rarely about accuracy. It’s a way of settling who gets to decide what a thing is called, which is power dressed up as vocabulary.

I’d push back on all of it, from the same place. A president wants a word that sounds like strength. A lab wants a word that sounds like the sublime, because the sublime raises money. Both are reaching past what the thing is toward what they’d like you to feel about it. And for you — at the kitchen table, at your desk, helping with homework or drafting an awkward email — not one of those words changes a single thing about what the tool does, or who is answerable when it gets something wrong. That part doesn’t move. You ask, it answers, you decide whether to act on it. If it’s wrong, the cost lands on you, not on it. No prefix — super, master, companion, omni — alters that chain by one link.

So call it what you like. I’d just be wary of any name handed to you by someone who benefits from you believing it. “Super” is a sales word. “Master” tells you where its author thinks you’re standing. “Companion” is a lovely word for a thing that cannot really be your friend, and the warmth is rather the point — it’s easier to trust something you’ve been invited to like.

The plainest name is the dull one, and it’s a job description rather than a rank: a tool you operate. A very good one, getting better by the month. But the relationship only works the way it should for as long as you stay the one giving the instructions and carrying the consequences — above it, in the only order of command that matters, whatever the letters on the box.

Though maybe the deeper reason no single word fits is that the thing has turned genuinely multifaceted — a research assistant one minute, a patient tutor the next, scaffolding under a job you’re doing the minute after. Many-sided and complicated, much like us. Those facets are a reflection, though, not a character of its own: it is as complex as the work you hand it, and as the person handing it over. The reflection can be flattering. It is still a reflection — and you’re the one standing in front of the mirror.

They can rename the Pentagon. They can decree a new acronym and watch Slovenia sell the T-shirts. What they can’t do, unless you let them, is talk you out of being the one in charge of the thing on your own screen.

Verify it yourself: CNBC — Trump tries to rename AI ‘super intelligence’ · Netcraft — Slovenian .si registrations overtake .ai · Domain Name Wire — Slovenia’s .si grows 15% after Trump’s UN speech · Meta Superintelligence Labs · Safe Superintelligence Inc.