Chronicle · The Words of Power
“Super intelligence”: renaming the bomb
Drop “artificial”, keep the danger.
October 5, 2026 · Reading ≈ 3 min · Jules Thomas
Renaming artificial intelligence “super intelligence” means coining a word to strip it of all its moral and dangerous charge, and turn it into a smooth product.
I am on my way home from work, sitting down, because I am lucky enough to have a driver. After marking countless papers and preparing the day's lessons, I started scrolling. And there I came across Elon Musk kissing Donald Trump's ass about superintelligence.
Musk, my absolute disappointment
Elon Musk, for me, is the absolute disappointment, because I worshipped the man when I was a kid. Back in the PayPal days. I am a child of the 90s, and Elon Musk was the cool geek figure who made me dream, who told me I could maybe be a normie, a normal human being, while keeping my sensitivity and my geeky side. Today the Übermensch has become a parody, and I no longer really know what to think of Elon Musk. Except that he is an incredible waste in the service of an incredible engineering intelligence, able to send rockets into space, but with a handling of his image and political ideas that are... I don't know. So much is said about him that I end up with a reflex of silence.
The renaming pathology
But on what concerns us today, you don't need to have gone to Harvard to criticise the phenomenon of SI, superintelligence.
Donald Trump has a pathology: renaming. After renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and more or less everything that could be renamed, here is his latest. Perhaps, by the way, a big case of insider trading: SI is also Slovenia's domain name, the .si. We rechristen artificial intelligence, which is literally artificial intelligence, and we call it superintelligence.
Fuck, I am so sick of these asshole spin doctors ready to rename anything and everything to make you swallow the pill, so that you buy some new piece of crap to shove up your ass.
A word to erase the danger
It doesn't get to me so much because “superintelligence” would be the wrong word: semantically speaking, these are indeed superintelligences. What makes me angry is watching a word created to remove all the moral and dangerous charge attached to artificial intelligence, in order to turn it into a smooth product. A super, super intelligent product.
And now that Elon Musk co-leads Project Meridian, the Pentagon cell tasked with imagining tomorrow's weapons, it may not be a superintelligence that comes crashing down on our heads. It may be a Tesla super nuclear bomb.
Shit! Since when did idiocracy stop being fiction and become our reality?