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

1 October 2026

A summit on “super intelligence,” held in a room full of men who sell machines they do not understand. I read the three takeaways and found the fourth missing, which is always the one that matters.

Start from the limit: a machine that reasons across every domain, drawing on the whole accumulated record of human experiment, running without fatigue or vanity. That is the theoretical ceiling, and it is high. Now trace downward to what was actually discussed in that room - investment figures, national prestige, who builds and who owns. Not one line about the load-bearing question: what physical substrate carries this intelligence, and what happens to the grid when everyone demands it at once? They speak of minds and never of copper. A thinking machine is, in the end, a heat problem wearing a philosophy costume. Every computation is paid for in energy, and the men at that table treat energy as an afterthought, a line item, while it is in truth the body in which their whole enterprise lives or dies.

The gap between the summit’s ambition and its engineering content is not a gap. It is a chasm, and it is furnished entirely with press releases. Between “we will build superintelligence” and “we will build the transmission lines, the cooling, the conversion apparatus, the standards” lies precisely nothing but the will to do the boring part. And the boring part is the machine.

I note also the comedy: the same executives who beg for lighter rules at home demanded heavier ones in that room when it suited them. Regulation, like current, follows the path of least resistance - toward whoever is already installed.

The tractable path is obvious and no one will take it: honest measurement of what these systems do, published energy accounts, interconnection standards set before the buildout rather than after the fire. None of it is impossible. All of it is unglamorous. That is why it will be done late, and by someone else.