🧠 Is “Artificial Intelligence” the Wrong Name?

For years, artificial intelligence was something humans built. We wrote the code. We designed the models. We trained them. We decided what they should do. Now something fundamental is beginning to change.

🔄 When AI Starts Building AI

AI is increasingly being used to write code, analyse experiments, generate hypotheses and accelerate the research needed to develop better AI systems. Anthropic describes this direction as recursive self-improvement — a future in which AI could eventually take over an increasing part of the process of developing its own successors. We are not there yet. But the direction is becoming easier to see. The question is slowly changing from: “How intelligent is the model?” to: “How much of the next AI can AI itself build?”

⚛️ From AI to ASI

This is where the term ASI — Artificial Superintelligence enters the conversation. ASI describes a hypothetical intelligence that would substantially exceed human intellectual capabilities. It does not exist today. But if AI becomes increasingly capable of improving the process that creates AI, the distance between one generation and the next could potentially become smaller. And nobody knows exactly where that process could lead.

👁️ I Actually Thought This Would Happen

There is something else I find fascinating. I have been thinking for some time that one day people would start asking whether “Artificial Intelligence” is still the right name. And now it has happened. On September 19, 2026, President Donald Trump launched a public poll asking whether Artificial Intelligence should be renamed. His suggestions: 1. Superior Intelligence 2. Extreme Intelligence 3. Supreme Intelligence You can see the original poll here: 👉 View Trump's AI naming poll on X It is only a poll, not an official renaming of the technology. But the words are interesting. Artificial. Superior. Extreme. Supreme.

👿 The Demon

This is not the first time people at the centre of the technology world have used unusual language to describe AI. In 2014, Elon Musk famously compared creating artificial intelligence to “summoning the demon.” That was not a claim that AI was literally demonic. It was a warning about creating something more powerful than its creators expected. Today, the language has become even more extraordinary. Superintelligence. Existential risk. Autonomous systems. Machines building machines. And sometimes even comparisons with intelligence from somewhere beyond humanity. None of this proves that AI is extraterrestrial, supernatural or demonic. But it does raise a strange question: Why do we keep reaching for language normally reserved for something beyond ourselves?

🌪️ The Black Hole

Maybe ASI is decades away. Maybe recursive self-improvement will reach limits. Maybe machines will never become capable of designing their own true successors. We simply do not know. But imagine a system that helps create a better system, which then helps create an even better one. At that point, AI would no longer be just a product of technological progress. It could become an engine of technological progress itself.

⚛️ And Then There Is Quantum

Meanwhile, another technological frontier is accelerating. On September 17, the U.S. Department of Energy announced the Quantum Genesis Q Competition, with up to $215 million in planned funding for the development of fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computers. The target includes systems with at least 100 logical qubits and hundreds of millions of fault-tolerant operations. This is not a project to build ASI. But it shows something important: AI is not developing alone. Computing power is expanding across multiple technological frontiers at the same time.

🛸 So What Comes Next?

Maybe one day we will look back at the phrase Artificial Intelligence and realise that it described only the beginning. Maybe “Superior Intelligence” will remain just a poll option. Maybe none of these names will matter. But I keep coming back to one question: What happens when the intelligence building the next intelligence is no longer entirely human? And perhaps the real question is even stranger: Who — or what — will build what comes next? 👁️ Watch carefully. Examine yourself. Follow the evidence.