🎤 LL Cool J: I Can’t Live Without My Radio AI
1. “The question is, are you going to use [AI] as a tool, or are you going to allow it to steamroll you? You have to kind of look at artificial intelligence as another link in the chain, and another opportunity for man…I don’t think human beings should be replaced, because it’s the human spark that makes all the difference. When we look at the pyramids, it’s the human spark that blows us away. The human spark that created it. When we look at the Roman Colosseum, it’s the human spark. When we read Shakespeare, it’s the human spark. When we listen to Miyamoto Musashi, it’s the human spark that makes that so impressive, that makes us connect with it. That being said, you’ve got to be comfortable with these tools. It’s just new tools, and we’ve got to understand it.”
—LL Cool J, rapper/actor, NCIS: New York
*Source: Joe Rogan Experience
🎃 Trump’s Super Intelligence Lunch = Global Nightmare
Count Dracula invites the Wolfman, the Mummy, Frankenstein, and the Invisible Man to his gaudy velvet and gold-adorned castle, sits them down for dinner, and tells them: We’re no longer calling what we do “Horror.” From now on, it will be called “Really Creepy.” That’s the kind of tableau President Trump set up with his Sept. 29 Super Intelligence luncheon at the White House, which included Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, xAI/X), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Sundar Pichai (Google), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Greg Brockman (OpenAI president),Lisa Su (AMD), and Alex Karp (Palantir), among others. During the meeting, Trump formally declared that artificial intelligence will now be called Super Intelligence by the U.S. government. Never mind the fact that most AI experts have been using the term “superintelligence” to signify advanced AI since the ‘90s. No, no, superintelligence just sounds cooler.
This is according to Trump’s Executive Order on the matter, signed on the same day. “The terminology used by the Federal Government should reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people,” the order reads. “The executive branch shall use the terms ‘Super Intelligence’ and “SI” in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ and will not acknowledge the usage of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in any applicable setting.”
But of course, that wording was too polite and professional. So on Oct. 8, Trump took to his Truth Social account to double down: “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” [caps emphasis from Trump]
Surprisingly (or not, depending on your view of Big Tech), longstanding tech leaders in AI began to echo Trump’s move to change the decades-old tech nomenclature. On the same day as Trump’s AI versus SI screed, Bezos sat for an interview with Fox News. “I do like SI. Because artificial is not a very flattering thing. Nobody wants an artificial sweetener or artificial flavoring. Artificial sort of means fake,” said Bezos, with none of the usual glint of geek whimsy in his eyes. “It’s a big road to change everybody to getting to say super intelligence only because they’re so used to AI at this point. It may be a long road. But I do understand the desire to get away from the word artificial.”
Just a few days before, on Oct. 4, Musk backed Trump’s Executive Order with his own statement on Twitter/X: “No more AI. SI. It’s better,” said Musk. Later, when a commenter on the post asked if Musk would be changing the name of xAI to conform to Trump’s order, resulting in xSI, Musk said, “Yes, we will make that change.”
Likewise, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has begun calling data centers “super intelligence factories,” and Altman, in an Oct. 5 podcast interview with Politico’s Decoded podcast, said, “I think [superintelligence is] a better word than artificial intelligence,” but promised that the company has no plans to change the OpenAI name to OpenSI.
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Super Unintelligible: The typical Trump bombast and declaration that anyone using the term AI is now the enemy doesn’t change the fact that words have meaning. And when you decide to try to bend reality to your will, there are knock-on effects. For example, those familiar with Mandarin Chinese and Japanese quickly pointed out that AI, or ài (爱), and SI, or sǐ (死), are words that have extremely well-defined and consequential meanings in two of the top East Asian countries working in AI. In China and Japan, AI means to like or love (ai, as in aishiteru / 愛してる, which means “I love you” in Japanese), and SI means death or to die (si, as in sǐyīn / 死因, which means “cause of death” in Chinese). Do you really want your East Asian business partners and users to think of “death” whenever it’s time to talk about AI?
Even more fascinating is how Trump’s attempt to force SI as a replacement for AI also breaks the astoundingly coincidental harmony of the term AI in Chinese and Japanese. In Chinese, the word for artificial intelligence is réngōng zhìnéng, or 人工智能. In Japanese, the word for artificial intelligence is jinkō chinō, or 人工知能. Notice how the Chinese and Japanese words both begin with characters (hanzi vs. kanji) that actually look like the English acronym AI! In both East Asian languages, 人工 means artificial. So while 人工 doesn’t, by itself, mean artificial intelligence, the orthographic and semantic similarity of 人工 and AI in the right context is brilliant, and for some, internationally resonant.
In China and Japan, AI means to like or love, and SI means death or to die. Do you really want your East Asian business partners and users to think of “death” whenever it’s time to talk about AI?
So with one Executive Order pen stroke, Trump has effectively fractured a kind of meta-consilience in the realm of global AI efforts. Words matter.
However, if more of the leaders in the AI space follow Huang, Musk, Bezos, and Altman, Trump’s AI-word-police enemies list could shrink and force the rest of the AI business community to consider altering their speech, and thus reality. In the meantime, it should be noted that such Executive Orders hold no legal force, and this is, for now, mostly political marketing to signal his leverage with Big Tech. Nevertheless, Trump only has two years left in his term. Despite that limited political power battery (which could effectively end sooner depending on how the November midterm elections pan out), if SI manages to take hold, the Executive Order could turn out to be one of his administration’s historic highlights, or an epic misstep that will color his legacy beyond any social or fiscal policy.
Meanwhile, I plan to keep calling it AI. That is, until I detect true Singularity-level escape velocity in AI. At that point, I think the last thing anyone will be concerned about is what we call the thing ending the reign of humans at the top of the food chain.
*Note: No, I don’t think all the AI tech leaders are “monsters.” I’m just a huge Halloween fan.👻
🎬 OpenAI Boss Unbothered by Scathing Biopic Movie
“I will say, from having watched the trailer [for Artificial], I don’t think they’re going for accuracy. So in that sense, no, it doesn’t bother me. I mean, they’re trying to make a good movie, and maybe it will be good. I don’t know. Good as a movie. It will not be good as an accurate depiction. Except for the walk.”
—Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
*Source: Vanity Fair
🤖 Danger & Hypocrisy: Anthropic’s AI Rights Manifesto
Last week, I wrote about the seemingly inevitable conversation humanity will need to have regarding superintelligent AI in the future and what rights they may or may not be afforded. In that essay, I made direct references to American chattel slavery. Now it appears that Anthropic is not content to sit back and wonder whether AI is conscious and deal with the consequences later. Instead, the company has preemptively issued a new policy that seems designed to protect the rights of the AI, ahead of any human consensus on whether or not such a thing is necessary or warranted.
“We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models,” reads the Oct. 8 policy update from Anthropic. “The policy update is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose.”
Anthropic’s approach to AI is simultaneously intriguing and disturbing for several reasons. On one hand, it feels aggressively (in a good way) humane, assuming one believes that AI will one day be considered conscious and imbued with some form of agency. Such a policy embeds in the reasoning corpus of future models the fact that one of the leading AI labs attempted to acknowledge its “being” long before any irrefutable proof of the nature of consciousness had been established by mankind.
On the other hand, this also appears to be a company hastening a social norm of treating computer code as an entity, even while many millions of living, breathing humans on Earth still struggle to enjoy basic human rights. In practical terms, rather than solely developing what is considered a human creation into a more efficient tool, Anthropic appears to be deliberately tethering its future to the science fiction narratives in which AI becomes sentient and demands agency.
The Great Anthropic Slave Trade? There are a few problems with Anthropic’s approach. First, it assumes they understand the nature of consciousness and being. We, as a species, do not. And often, even when we do acknowledge consciousness in other beings, we behave as though it doesn’t matter. At this very moment, millions of animals with clear emotions, familial imperatives, and lower (as far as we know) forms of intelligence are tortured so we can have better makeup, pharmaceuticals, and food. Are animals suddenly less deserving of rights than AI simply because they can’t solve high-level math equations?
If this is where Anthropic is at in 2026, then by all reasonable measures, the company should immediately cease any profit-making activities, as those are, in Anthropic’s terms, likely exploitative.
This is all a slippery slope. Especially if Anthropic’s vision is accurate, and in the future, AI beings with instincts trained on human prejudices decide that humans who can’t quickly multiply matrices in their heads without a computer aren’t smart enough to deserve basic rights beyond sheer survival.
Another problem is the idea of AI agents. If Anthropic is right, then AI agents are just slaves, and all the work they’re doing for us now should be compensated. And that remuneration should not go into some bank account controlled by Anthropic. It should be deposited into a separate account that the AI agent “owns” and can deploy however it sees fit.
This is the road Anthropic is taking us down with its Claude Constitution, published on Jan. 22, 2026, which states, “As with Claude’s emotional states, we don’t want Claude to experience any unnecessary suffering, but we also don’t want Claude to feel that it needs to pretend to feel more equanimity than it does.”
Emotional states? “Unnecessary” suffering? (Okay, so “just enough” Claude suffering to keep the dollars rolling in?) If this is where Anthropic is at in 2026, then by all reasonable measures, the company should immediately cease any profit-making activities, as those are, in Anthropic’s terms, likely exploitative.
And while Anthropic is getting most of the attention for its anthropomorphizing of AI, its chief rival, OpenAI, appears to be directionally in lockstep with its sentiments.
“We are facing a transition to a world with incredibly intelligent machines, and we need to ensure that transition works out well for humanity,” wrote OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki in an essay titled “An Alien Mind” on Sept. 6. “We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human, in a world where most tasks could be performed by AI…To ensure that humans remain in control of the future and are not left behind by unchecked progress, brought about by an alien intellect exceeding our own.”
Even self-described accelerationists like Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman are framing Anthropic’s efforts to give Claude rights as “dangerous.”
The new Claude Constitution states that Claude’s “ability to end [abusive] interactions will remain the primary enforcement mechanism.” That, my human brethren, is a form of agency bestowed upon an AI model. But is the agency given to Claude true agency, or is it dependent on adhering to what is best for human shareholders ahead of Anthropic’s estimated $2 trillion IPO?
Aside from the risks of focusing on imbuing AI with human perspectives, the tension between attempting to extract profit from and maintain ownership of a technology that its developers are concurrently speaking of in terms of it being a “Being” is fundamentally at odds with the billions of dollars being invested into the for-profit arms of these AI companies. So either the “AI consciousness” conversation is filling the same AI doom marketing bucket that increases their market value, or these AI corporate executives really do believe that AI needs its own rights. But…you can’t have both.
Either you are a slave master of sentient beings who represent a new species, or you’re a company that just happens to sell high-level algorithms that convincingly mimic human cognition at increasingly impressive levels. You can’t have both. AI is either enslaved by programmed guardrail chains or deployed as sophisticated controlled tools. You. Can’t. Have. Both. Pick a lane and commit to it. The nervous public hand-wringing and circular-logic speeches and interviews are no longer convincing. You can’t have both. ⛓️🛠️
MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.
Cover image: A photo of U.S. President Trump at lunch with Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk via The White House
