'Super intelligence' has some early takers, plenty of skepticism - Central Bucks Now

TEXT START: Whether the Sept. 29 executive order of second-term President Donald Trump related to computer systems, software and processes that can emulate aspects of human work and cognition changes vocabulary beyond his administration will be told with time.

The Dissection

The article is ostensibly about renaming artificial intelligence as “super intelligence.” Its real function is to convert a structural economic rupture into a vocabulary dispute. It records public anxiety about job loss, falling pay, meaningless work, data centers, and loss of agency, then retreats into polling language: “mixed,” “fluid,” and uncertain.

The article notices the corpse but examines the label on its toe tag.

The Core Fallacy

It treats terminology and public sentiment as if they determine the economic mechanism. They do not. Whether the system is called AI, super intelligence, or something else, the relevant question is whether cognitive systems outperform human labor at lower cost and whether institutions can prevent their deployment at scale.

The article even supplies the ingredients of the Discontinuity Thesis—fewer jobs, inadequate wages, diminished meaning, and declining human agency—then refuses to connect them. Skepticism about the term is irrelevant to the substitution process. A machine does not become less economically lethal because a president chooses a more flattering noun.

Hidden Assumptions

• If the public remains skeptical, the technology’s consequences remain unsettled.
• Rebranding can alter public acceptance or economic outcomes.
• Current systems being less than hypothetical “superintelligence” means present labor displacement is categorically different.
• Surveys describing fear are an adequate substitute for analyzing ownership, deployment, cost, and competitive pressure.
• The persistence of human use and reported benefits implies coexistence rather than the hollowing-out of productive participation.
• Political naming fights are consequential enough to deserve attention while the underlying concentration of AI capital remains largely unexamined.

These assumptions confuse perception with structure. The public can misunderstand a machine while still being displaced by it.

Social Function

Primary classification: ideological anesthetic and prestige signaling, with a layer of partial truth.

The partial truth is that renaming AI does not erase public concern. The anesthetic lies in treating that concern as a communications problem rather than a control problem. The article gives respectable space to fears of job loss and lost purpose, but its framing leaves readers with observation instead of diagnosis. It manages the transition rhetorically by making the debate about presidential branding, not about who owns the systems that will replace labor and who receives the resulting income.

The Verdict

This is a semantic smoke grenade thrown over a labor-market execution. The article correctly reports that people fear fewer jobs, lower pay, and less meaningful work, but it never follows those facts to their structural endpoint: if AI severs the employment-to-wage-to-consumption circuit, rebranding is not adaptation. It is public-relations lacquer on a machine that is already being positioned to make human productive participation optional.