Amber Sinha is a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press.Photo of a broken laptop screen, by Leon Brocard on Flickr (CC-BY-2.0)At the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, United States President Trump made the case for rebranding frontier AI as “super intelligence” instead of artificial intelligence. In his speech before world leaders, he emphasized the AI race in the most blatant terms — “Whoever wins AI…and now I say, whoever wins ‘super intelligence’, wins. That’s the group that wins.”This was a month where safety concerns completely hijacked popular discourse and policy conversations about AI. By my count, this seems to happen at least once a year, ever since an infamous open letter coordinated by Future of Life Institute called for a “pause” on “giant AI experiments” in 2023. The triggers this time were the Hugging Face security incident, and the very public resignation of Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, who warned that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”Trump is by no means the first person to use the term “super intelligence”. And the AI safety warnings by industry leaders are also framed in terms we have heard before. We are told that we stand on the threshold of unleashing autonomous, superintelligent entities capable of escaping human oversight. Yet this panic over rogue synthetic minds is matched only by the utopian hype surrounding AI. In both cases, we are trapped in a world of broken metaphors.The terms we use to describe…

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