Trump’s Crazy AI Rebrand Was a Loyalty Test for Tech Execs—and It Worked
Trump’s Crazy AI Rebrand Was a Loyalty Test for Tech Execs—and It Worked
特朗普疯狂的 AI 更名计划是对科技高管的忠诚度测试——而且奏效了
Seventy years ago last summer, a group of scientists met at Dartmouth College to discuss a wild idea—that machines might one day be capable of human-like thought processes. One of those scientists, John McCarthy, had suggested a name for the new field: artificial intelligence. It stuck. When you search Google Scholar for “artificial intelligence,” approximately 7,420,000 results appear. The term is utterly ubiquitous. Everyone understands it. Even for people who despise AI, the least of their worries is what we call it.
七十年前的夏天，一群科学家在达特茅斯学院聚会，讨论一个大胆的想法——机器有朝一日可能具备类似人类的思维过程。其中一位科学家约翰·麦卡锡（John McCarthy）为这个新领域提出了一个名称：人工智能（Artificial Intelligence）。这个名字沿用了下来。当你在谷歌学术（Google Scholar）上搜索“人工智能”时，大约会出现 7,420,000 条结果。这个术语极其普遍，每个人都理解它。即使是那些厌恶 AI 的人，他们最不担心的也是我们如何称呼它。
Well, not everyone. Somehow, President Donald J. Trump developed a distaste for the term, and when he doesn’t like something, he feels free to issue an edict against it. In a September 23 speech at the United Nations, he hinted that he might want to do away with the term “artificial intelligence.” His rant seemed like bluster, even for someone with a penchant for renaming gulfs, lakes, and centers for the arts. Renaming an entire field of study and America’s most pivotal industry? This week, at a White House lunch with top AI leaders, he actually pulled the trigger with an executive order declaring that “artificial intelligence” was now a verboten coinage. Instead, the government will call it “Super Intelligence.” Clearly the president expects the private sector to follow suit.
好吧，并非所有人。不知何故，唐纳德·J·特朗普总统对这个术语产生了反感，而当他不喜欢某样东西时，他总是随心所欲地发布禁令。在 9 月 23 日的联合国演讲中，他暗示自己可能想要废除“人工智能”这个词。他的这番言论听起来像是虚张声势，即便对于一个热衷于给海湾、湖泊和艺术中心改名的人来说也是如此。要为一个完整的学科领域和美国最关键的产业改名？本周，在白宫与顶级 AI 领袖共进午餐时，他真的扣动了扳机，签署了一项行政命令，宣布“人工智能”现在是一个被禁用的词汇。取而代之的是，政府将称其为“超级智能”（Super Intelligence）。显然，总统期望私营部门效仿。
To their shame, the lords of AI meekly acquiesced. From this point on, they will presumably be known as the lords of SI. One can’t help but see this as the ultimate presidential flex—for all the executives’ trillions of dollars and all their actual intelligence, the alpha in the room was the guy with the orange skin. Changing a name might seem like a minor matter compared to the enormity of constraining a potentially catastrophic technology. But to this crowd, artificial intelligence is much more than a bunch of letters strung together. It’s their foundation. Their identity. When they were kids reading science fiction books under the covers, the term ignited their imaginations. They built or transformed their companies in service of AI, and it’s just about all they’ve talked about for the past four years.
令他们蒙羞的是，这些 AI 巨头们温顺地默许了。从现在起，他们大概会被称为“SI 巨头”。人们不禁认为这是总统权力的终极展示——尽管这些高管拥有数万亿美元的财富和真正的智慧，但房间里的“领头羊”却是那个皮肤橙黄的男人。与约束一项可能带来灾难的技术这一重大任务相比，改名似乎是一件小事。但对这群人来说，“人工智能”不仅仅是一串字母的组合。它是他们的基石，是他们的身份。当他们还是孩子，躲在被窝里读科幻小说时，这个词点燃了他们的想象力。他们为了 AI 而建立或转型了自己的公司，这也是过去四年里他们谈论的几乎全部内容。
Yet when the president used his lunch soiree to win their approval for his wacky idea to undo 70 years of history, apparently not a single person in the room expressed an objection. Not Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Greg Brockman, Alex Karp, or Elon Musk.
然而，当总统利用午餐会来争取他们对这一推翻 70 年历史的古怪想法的支持时，房间里显然没有一个人提出异议。杰夫·贝索斯（Jeff Bezos）、黄仁勋（Jensen Huang）、达里奥·阿莫代（Dario Amodei）、马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）、桑达尔·皮查伊（Sundar Pichai）、格雷格·布罗克曼（Greg Brockman）、亚历克斯·卡普（Alex Karp）或埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）都没有反对。
Jacob Weisberg, author of the recent book Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, views the episode as a classic Trump loyalty test, meant to assess if otherwise powerful people will demean themselves to curry the president’s favor and avoid his wrath. If you pass the loyalty test, you fail the backbone test. “The only way to resist this kind of thing is by acting collectively,” says Weisberg. “If all of those guys had just said, ‘We’ll agree to the terms of the self-regulation, but we don’t accept [the name change], what would he have done?”
最近出版的《懦夫档案：特朗普时代的合作研究》（Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era）一书的作者雅各布·魏斯伯格（Jacob Weisberg）认为，这一事件是典型的特朗普式忠诚度测试，旨在评估这些本已权势显赫的人是否会自降身段以讨好总统并避免其愤怒。如果你通过了忠诚度测试，你就没通过骨气测试。“抵制这种事情的唯一方法就是集体行动，”魏斯伯格说，“如果所有这些人当时都说：‘我们同意自我监管的条款，但我们不接受（改名），’他又能怎么样呢？”
Instead, because of the lamb-like silence of the billionaires, Trump could claim that those leaders actively blessed his idea. When a reporter in the post-lunch press gaggle mentioned AI agents, he corrected her, saying, “The name has been changed by the biggest, the, smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world.” Really?
相反，由于亿万富翁们像羔羊般沉默，特朗普得以声称这些领袖积极支持了他的想法。当午餐后的记者会上有一位记者提到“AI 代理”时，他纠正了她，说道：“这个名字已经被世界上最伟大、最聪明、最了不起的人改掉了。”真的吗？
Even using the magic of, uh, superintelligent systems like ChatGPT or Gemini, I could not find a single instance of any one of those great people previously politicking that the term artificial intelligence should be put to rest. Satya Nadella did once say that he would have preferred that AI had been called “different intelligence,” but that hasn’t dissuaded him from repeatedly using the term. And while it’s true that Mark Zuckerberg recently established a Superintelligence Lab, his company persistently pushes a product called Meta AI to its billions of users and sells what it calls AI glasses.
即使利用 ChatGPT 或 Gemini 等“超级智能”系统的魔力，我也找不到任何一个上述伟人曾经游说废除“人工智能”这一术语的先例。萨提亚·纳德拉（Satya Nadella）确实曾表示，他更希望 AI 被称为“不同智能”（different intelligence），但这并没有阻止他反复使用“人工智能”这个词。虽然马克·扎克伯格最近确实成立了一个“超级智能实验室”（Superintelligence Lab），但他的公司仍在持续向数十亿用户推广名为“Meta AI”的产品，并销售所谓的“AI 眼镜”。
I asked Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and xAI whether they were going to change instances of AI in their product names, research papers, and communications. My query to the latter two was whether they were going to change their company names to get in sync with the presidential order. As I write this, none of them have gotten back to me.
我询问了谷歌、微软、Anthropic、Meta、亚马逊、OpenAI 和 xAI，他们是否打算更改产品名称、研究论文和通讯中出现的“AI”字样。我对后两家公司的询问是，他们是否打算更改公司名称以配合总统的行政命令。在我写这篇文章时，他们都没有回复我。
My bet is that they will do the minimum to avoid presidential ire, while trying to run out the clock until the next administration puts this bizarre idea out of its misery. It’s been suggested that the executives actually welcome a rebranding of what has become a toxic term. I’m skeptical of that, especially since the president’s mandated replacement, “super intelligence,” is a hell of a lot scarier than the original term.
我敢打赌，他们会做最低限度的配合以避免总统的愤怒，同时试图拖延时间，直到下一届政府终结这个荒谬的想法。有人认为，高管们实际上欢迎对这个已经变得“有毒”的术语进行品牌重塑。对此我表示怀疑，尤其是因为总统强制要求的替代词“超级智能”比原先的术语要可怕得多。
From a scientific perspective the change also makes no sense. No less an expert than Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who popularized the term superintelligence in an eponymous book, seems baffled by the idea. Superintelligence, he explained to me in an email, “refers specifically to systems that greatly surpass all the best human brains. ‘AI’ has referred to a much broader category of systems, which includes, for example, email spam filters, spell checkers, simple navigation systems, early LLMs, and the chess engines of the ’70s that didn’t yet match the best human chess players. It seems awkward to refer to these as ‘superintelligent.’”
从科学角度来看，这种改变也毫无意义。哲学家尼克·波斯特罗姆（Nick Bostrom）——正是他在同名著作中普及了“超级智能”一词——对此似乎感到困惑。他在一封电子邮件中向我解释说，超级智能“专门指代那些大大超越所有最优秀人类大脑的系统。而‘AI’指代的是一个更广泛的系统类别，例如包括电子邮件垃圾邮件过滤器、拼写检查器、简单的导航系统、早期的 LLM，以及 70 年代那些还无法匹敌顶尖人类棋手的国际象棋引擎。把这些称为‘超级智能’似乎很尴尬。”
So what is the president’s reason for demanding the change, besides because he can? In his UN speech, he said he didn’t like the term because “the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake. And it is not fake.” What is fake, he said after the White House lunch, is the term “artificial intelligence.” “It’s a fake word, it’s not good, an inappropriate term.” You don’t need to be a psychologist to see how this impulse might be associated with his decision to bounce CNN, Politico, and MSNow from the White House, because he perceives their news as “fake.” Still, the leap that equates artificial with fake does…
那么，除了因为他有权这样做之外，总统要求更改名称的理由是什么？在联合国演讲中，他说他不喜欢这个词，因为“‘人工’（artificial）这个词让智能显得虚假。而它并非虚假。”在白宫午餐会后，他说真正虚假的是“人工智能”这个词。“这是一个虚假的词，它不好，是一个不恰当的术语。”你不需要成为心理学家就能看出，这种冲动可能与他决定将 CNN、Politico 和 MSNow 赶出白宫的决定有关，因为他认为他们的新闻是“虚假”的。尽管如此，将“人工”等同于“虚假”的这种跳跃性思维确实……