Newz"From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world's will be changed to use the much more accurate term 'super' as opposed to artificial." That was Donald Trump at the United Nations General Assembly on Sept 22, and true to form, he didn't stop at a soundbite.A week later, he signed an executive order titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence", ordering federal agencies to swap "artificial intelligence" and "AI" for "super intelligence" and "SI" across official documents and websites. The same day, executives from Meta, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic signed a separate, voluntary White House Accord on Super Intelligence.It's tempting to laugh this off as branding, especially since Trump's own explanation was that "artificial" "makes intelligence sound fake. It is not fake." But wait a minute.Words matter, and this one has a specific meaning.
The term was popularised by philosopher Nick Bostrom, then at the University of Oxford, in his 2014 book Superintelligence, and it describes not a machine that matches us but one that vastly outperforms the brightest humans in practically every field.Today's systems aren't there yet, and Trump may simply think "artificial" sounds cheap. But when Meta has had a division literally called Meta Superintelligence Labs since 2025 and the world's most powerful government adopts the same vocabulary, I can't help but feel they are preparing us for something far beyond today's chatbots.So what does that world look like? Three questions keep nagging at me.Do we still need schools?Six years ago, I argued in this column that AI could help fix our broken school system, pointing to Chinese and American platforms that taught maths at each student's own pace.
The evidence has since piled up faster than I expected.In 2025, the World Bank published the results of a six-week after-school programme in Nigeria's Edo State, where students worked in pairs with Microsoft Copilot, a GPT-4-powered assistant, in up to two 90-minute sessions a week under a teacher's supervision. The gains, the lead researchers later wrote, "correspond to nearly 1.5 years of typical learning in just six weeks", outperforming around 80% of the education programmes tested in randomised trials across the developing world.Now imagine that this tutor isn't merely good but superintelligent and available to every child in ev…
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