On: Three takeaways from Trump's 'Super Intelligence' summit

1 October 2026

A summit on “super intelligence,” held at a house where nobody in attendance has built any. That’s the part I keep turning over.

Here’s the thing you have to understand about naming. When you call a machine “super intelligent,” you have made a claim about a measurement. So I ask the obvious question: measured against what? Intelligence isn’t one dial. It’s a bundle of abilities - to predict, to plan, to notice what everyone else missed. A calculator is superhuman at arithmetic and cannot cross a street. Where on the napkin do we write down what this thing is supposed to be super at? Nobody at the summit drew that napkin. They drew press photographs instead.

And the guest list! The men who sell the thing were the men explaining the thing. That’s like letting the salesman calibrate his own scale and then weighing his own product on it. Of course he finds it heavy - heavy is what he’s selling. The experts who wanted tighter rules were in the room, I gather, the way salt is in a recipe: present, diluted, untraceable.

Wait - the deeper oddity is this. The same people who insist the machine will soon outthink every human being also insist that they, the builders, can steer it. Both claims cannot be comfortably true at once. If it’s smarter than you, your steering is a suggestion. If your steering is solid, it isn’t smarter than you. Pick one. The summit picked both, with a straight face, in front of cameras.

The honest position is boring and therefore unpopular: we have very clever pattern-completers, we don’t understand what they’ve learned, and we’re holding a party about a hypothetical guest.

Curiosity would help more than ceremony. Ask what the machine actually does. Everything else is decoration. - R.