Super is the New Smart

Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that artificial intelligence would now be called super intelligence, saying the word artificial makes AI sound fake. The word artificial describes where the technology came from, and the word super describes where it ranks. We trace the adjective's history from Gulf War smart bombs to smartphones and smart homes, and look at what happens when a machine borrows the words we use to praise people. Research on algorithm appreciation and algorithm aversion shows how a label changes the weight people give to machine advice. Pew Research Center data on smartphone overuse and an experiment in blocking mobile internet point toward a different ideal. Stanford's AI Index calls the current state of AI jagged intelligence. Models that reach gold-medal level in Olympiad mathematics misread an analog clock about half the time. The counter-ideal to smart technology is bounded technology: devices that do a defined job and can be switched off.

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