When Washington Skips the People Who Do the Work, Our Kids Are Watching

Every school year on Long Island starts the same way, with parents meeting the teachers who will spend the year ahead with their children. We trust those teachers because they know their subjects and do the work every day. We would never let a textbook company walk into a classroom and change what a word means in science class without asking them.

On September 29, Washington did something close to that with one of the most important words of our time.

What Happened

Subscribe

President Trump signed an executive order that renames artificial intelligence, so federal agencies now have to call it Super Intelligence. Six technology executives signed a voluntary pledge under the new name that day, including the heads of Google, Meta, and Nvidia, along with Elon Musk. They are powerful people who run enormous companies.

The people who actually defined superintelligence were not in the room. That word has a long history, written by scientists and researchers over decades. A statistician named I. J. Good imagined a machine smarter than the brightest person back in 1965, and he warned that it had to stay under our control. The philosopher Nick Bostrom later defined superintelligence as an intellect that far exceeds human ability in nearly every area of life, which is a very high bar.

The order skips all of that history. It gives the new name to everything the law already calls AI. The spam filter in your email and the app that suggests your next song now carry the grandest word in the field.

Why It Matters at the Kitchen Table

Our kids are growing up with AI in their homework and on their phones, and it will follow them into their jobs. Our schools have to decide how students may use it, and our teachers are the ones who make those rules work in a real classroom. Those teachers learned their subjects, and they answer to parents when something goes wrong.

Now think about the lesson Washington just taught. The people who sell the product got a seat at the table and a pen. The people who did the thinking were left out of the room.

We spend years telling our children to respect the people who know their subject. We tell them to listen to the nurse, the coach, the science teacher, and the engineer, because expertise is earned. When the government hands a scientific word to the people with the most money riding on it, our kids notice. They learn that the people who do the work can be dismissed when they get in the way.

I don't believe that lesson is acceptable on Long Island, and I don't think most parents here do either.

A Joke or a Warning

I have studied this field for years, and I do not think superintelligence has arrived. I don't even think we have reached the step below it, a machine that can learn and adapt across every kind of task the way a person does. If superintelligence is still far off, the new name is a bad joke, because nothing got smarter when the label changed.

If the people who fear superintelligence are right, the joke stops being funny. One of the scientists who imagined these machines said the one thing that mattered was control. The answer in Washington was a promise the companies will police themselves.

What We Can Do Here

By November 28, the White House science adviser has to propose an official federal definition of the word. That gives all of us a few weeks to ask a simple question that every parent already understands: who decided this, and who answers for it?

We can ask the same question closer to home. When our schools write their AI rules, the teachers who carry those rules out should help write them. When a company sells our district a new tool, the people who will use it with our children should test it before anyone signs.

Our kids are watching how we treat the people who do the work, and they will treat them the same way. The full story, with all the history and the details behind it, is on my site.

Read the full article: Superintelligence Has Authors, the US Government Is Not One of Them