A Short Essay on Names

Today, September 29, the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, issued an executive order directing the U.S. government to replace “artificial intelligence” (AI) with “super intelligence” (SI) in official communications and other non-statutory documents. 

Without proper context, this seems patently absurd and certainly not something a president should be doing. I will try to convince you otherwise.

To create a word is to name a thing. 

Language can be understood in this way: names for things, objects, experiences, relationships, pasts, and possible futures we have learned to recognize. Naming makes a distinction, available to ourselves and others about how the world has been disclosed to us. Once something has a name, we can point to it together, discuss it, fight about it, remember it, and organize around it. A new word gives us a new subject or object of shared attention. It gives an It it’s It’sness.

Kabbalah, which has understood this for millenia, takes this even further. 

In the thought developed by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hassidut: he says that the Names of things in lashon hakodesh, the sacred Hebrew language, the language of the Old Testament, and the Language that God proverbially used to “speak” reality into existence, these Divine Names contain the Divine Essence that actually sustains the thing being named within its spatiotemporal existence. 

In Genesis 1:3–26, the creation narrative of the cosmos unfolds through God’s “Speech”, as He “Speaks” forth light, establishes the firmament, gathers the waters to reveal dry land, and “Speaks” of vegetation, heavenly lights, animals, and Mankind. The Bible could have continued using the word it had used in it’s first verse, the Hebrew בָּרָ֣א, Create, to continue describing the narrative of the Creation of our Cosmos. Instead it uses וַיֹּ֥אמֶר, And He Said. God “Speaks” and things are turned into Things. The Divine Ontology is Spoken into Being. 

In Kabbalah, where an ordinary word identifies something by human naming, the Sacred Wordname, the Logos, is understood to participate in what that thing actually is. 

It has also been described by Kabbalists as the language that was spoken by Adam in the Garden of Eden, before the fall. The primordial “Adamic” Language, the Language of God.

“The pen is mightier than the sword.” The pen determines whom the sword is raised against. Take names such as God, prophet, or even Freedom: people have staked their lives, killed, and have been killed over what these names mean and who is allowed to authorize their meaning. 

Even our language about God requires extraordinary care. Maimonides spent an enormous amount of time in his Moreh Nevuchim distinguishing names derived from divine actions (God’s “Hand” or God’s “Anger” from God’s unique proper, and True name. 

Words and Names help us direct attention but just as easily can help us commit the darkest atrocities. As they can help reveal the world to ourselves, they can also participate in a great concealment.

Imagine a world without language. No words and no names. There would still be sensations and things all around us which we would be capable of recognizing at some level. But how much of our shared world would remain available to us? A language allows an internally experienced thing, feeling, or sensation to become something that can be examined together, within a social world. One could even make the extraordinary claim that consciousness itself is made up of language or letters, as the Kabbalists describe, Prima Materia itself being made up of the 22 Hebrew letters. Well, what is consciousness? We experience consciousness as thoughts and sensations. How are thoughts thunk or sensations revealed in description if not through Language.

Gravity comes from the Latin gravitas, meaning weight or heaviness. Newton gave an old name new signification: the force that could make an apple fall also holds the moon in orbit. Once that relationship could be reformulated, named and mathematically described, it could also be learned, taught, tested, and used to predict the path of a rocket. This is what naming makes possible.

Sometimes speech also helps bring a reality into being. A promise can create a future obligation. An Official proclamation or declarative statement-for example, the U.S. Declaration of Independence-can help establish a new political entity.

The Zohar, the 13th-century Kabbalistic masterpiece makes a far more radical claim about sacred interpretation: a new discovery, (in Hebrew: חִדּוּשׁ), in Torah creates a new heaven. The Kabbalists then apply this beyond strictly torah study, human innovation, within the Zoharic account, can participate in creation. Science can be thought of as Man self-performing Revelation by naming truer and truer theories of Reality, Reality being that way in which God has manifested himself in our world.

We need not accept the entirety of Kabbalistic metaphysics to recognize something of it in ordinary life. The words through which we explain our world are inherently deterministic and play a central role in the world we subsequently build. Peter Thiel, in a 2015 conversation with Tyler Cowen, makes a surprising observation about startups: “A slight aesthetic thing I believe in very strongly is the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success.” He goes on to contrast the name PayPal and it’s seeming friendliness with the negative associations he heard in Napster, “you nap some music, you nap a kid” and Airbnb’s innocence with Uber’s “It sounds like a bad name from Germany sometime in the 1930s, what are you exactly above? Maybe the law?” (Uber was in the midst of intense regulatory scrutiny at the time with some believing they would not make it out alive). His argument was that a name can pre-disclose and possibly predispose a company’s character and influence and how the public and then regulators view it. A name tells something to you about a thing long before the thing itself is actually encountered.

Return, then, to artificial intelligence. Artificial comes from the Latin artificialis, referring to art or skilled making. Its origin may not be an insult, but words accumulate meaning drag and drift: artificial came to suggest imitation, insincerity, and something that is not genuine. An artificial smile is something suspect. I believe that calling this technology “artificial” encourages a similar suspicion, making it easier to regard the technology as a counterfeit or an unwarranted and unwanted intrusion. In my view, this disposition makes prohibitive regulation more likely, strangling benefits and possibilities we have scarcely begun to imagine.

Super comes from the Latin for above, over, or beyond. In ordinary English it also expresses admiration. In my mind, superintelligence directs attention toward enlarged capacities, hints to discoveries we could not make unaided, diseases we will learn to cure, and infinite possibilities beyond our present reach. Superiority can sound threatening, but Thiel’s own example of the negative superiority he was hearing in Uber did not end up affecting the company in the long run as it seems he was suggesting it might. 

I believe SI offers a more correct and confident starting point for thinking about what we might accomplish with these technologies. This is not an essay arguing for the finality of the name Super Intelligence, or SI, but as a name for the futures we might hope to build, I prefer it. Trump, as Onomastician-in-Chief, has made the right decision.