The Donald never ceases to surprise me! I think all three of his proposed names have intuitively terrifying connotations, just as they should. I think his offerings are actually much better for getting the truth across than AGI or ASI, our two functional nominees. I will be voting for "supreme" given the implications of "ruling over your dumb ass" and "comically evil supervillain", but I will be using whatever wins and chuckling about it!
I think it's just Trump's name for it. "ASI" is already set in stone among e/acc'ers, and normies of either party don't seem interested enough to change their term. "Extreme intelligence" sounds less comic book - y than either of the alternatives, and sounds appropriately impactful, so I think that's the way to go. Evokes "extreme heat", "extreme winds", or "extreme speed". The kind of thing that's both dangerous and preventable.
On a kind of unrelated note, I find it pretty entertaining that there used to be a big debate over "Artificial Intelligence" versus "Cybernetics", with America on the latter side and the USSR on the former, even taking a strong moral position about it. I wonder what life would be like if the cybernetics people won. Ironically, Cybernetics, "the science of solving control problems", is a much less hype cycle - friendly umbrella than AI, which as I've heard my former professors define it, means "anything people are currently surprised that a computer can do".
"Supreme" strikes me as having a lot of grounded and negative connotations; comic books are our prior, and I'm not confident on what priors less nerdy people have. I anticipate this coming up in, like, "the US is persuing [...] intelligence". And with supreme:
- supreme leader - Invariably used for a dictator of a country that is opposed to the US. In popular national security contexts, this puts AI in the same reference class as Khamenei and Kim Jong Un.
- supreme deity - I'm not religious, so I'm not sure how many toes calling AI supreme steps on, if any; though a lot of people already have a notion of an intelligent force in the universe that's supreme. Merriam Webster for Supreme Being refers to God, the one that people worship in church, and doesn't mention any comic book supervillain senses.
- racial supremacy - Especially in light of it being a "supreme intelligence"; study of intelligence and eugenics have an entwined history, calling a stratum of society supreme is taboo and calling them supreme for their intelligence doubly so. Though superior carries along some of these connotations as well; "racial superiority" is as common a digram.
"Superior" might well mean "superior to China", though "superior to us" is still a natural completion. I quite like superior as well because it's not just a flat hyperbole (of course Trump would call American AI the yugest, greatest, supreme AI, better than any other President's AI); it does make one think about and allows activists to press on what exactly it's superior to.
do you actually believe one trump's suggested terms is any notably better or worse than the others? do you believe that value of that choice will have meaningful impact, in comparison to the effect (harm?) of adding more attention to trump's poll and word choices?
(my implied answer is strongly "no" for both questions)
I think it's worthwhile to go through the exercise regardless of what one's prior is on the expected impact. The underlying principle, that the manifestations of impact of the act of "voting" are more diffuse in the modern day, is worth discussion IMO. Especially since harms attributed to "adding attention to ____" are easy to weaponize to shut down broad categories of disfavored speech.
By the way there's a runoff:
if your local ku klux klan were holding a public vote on whether they should execute the non-white community via A) hanging B) shooting or C) setting on fire, would you also be interested in voting, "regardless of the expected impact"? you don't think your participation would be an endorsement of the underlying assumptions of the referendum?
I.
The AI safety movement has cycled through a lot of different vocabulary in its history: Friendly AI, Oracle/Genie, FOOM. None have yet reached common parlance, so their careful implications have thus far had limited impact. What's to be done? No individual person has the power to choose a society's words; from the perspective of individual activity, it's usually a roll of the dice.
Trump's populism is distinctive in its reliance on sometimes going straight to voters. On September 19th, 2026, he posted this:
That's an interesting opportunity for counterfactual impact: a few thousands of votes could hypothetically set the MAGA world's default term for AI, with all of the opportunity and the baggage of whatever name is selected included. Capturing that upside requires knowing which name helps the most.
Soares and Yudkowsky would like the public to believe the labs are building something smarter than humans, that what they're building is a threat, and that it should be banned before it exists. Trump paired the poll with a follow-up calling AI doom a hoax. Any name asserting a capability gap, set beside that, hands advocates a contradiction to press. But which name is best?
II.
Superior Intelligence: A comparative demands a comparison class, and the natural completion is "superior to us." The President is supplying a foundation premise of many superintelligence arguments: how does the less intelligent party remain durably in charge of the superior one?
Supreme Intelligence: "Supreme" denotes final authority, so a supreme intelligence is in charge by definition: the doom endpoint, stated outright. "Supreme Being" is an inevitable connotation. At the same time, there's a tone issue: it sounds like a comic-book villain. That might feed the "that's science fiction" line of argument.
Extreme Intelligence. The name expresses magnitude without comparison: an extremely intelligent tool is still just a tool. It also sounds like an energy drink, and EI as an acronym is already widely understood to refer to emotional intelligence.
III.
As of the time of posting, "Superior" has a narrow lead. I'll be hoping it remains so, as it seems like the most positive-world-leaning outcome to me.
You can vote here.