The President’s September 29 executive order directs the executive branch to replace “Artificial Intelligence” with “Super Intelligence,” emphasizing the amplification of human ingenuity rather than imitation alone. Moving beyond “artificial” can open a larger conceptual conversation. We can ask what intelligence produces and makes possible, rather than treating machine intelligence as an imitation of something that belongs exclusively inside a human head.
But does “superintelligence” leave us with another version of the same problem? We can still imagine intelligence as something contained inside an exceptional entity—only now, a machine towering above its human counterparts. Changing the adjective does not necessarily change the underlying assumption. And “super” leaves an essential question unanswered: super compared with an individual human, or with everything humans accomplish together?
Consider a different starting point: we are already superintelligence.
Human superintelligence is called humanity. Our languages, accumulated knowledge, tools, and continuing exchanges produce capabilities that no individual could possess or exercise alone. In the perspective proposed here, ant superintelligence is the colony; starling superintelligence is the murmuration; tree superintelligence is the forest. These are not claims that each collective has a giant mind thinking giant thoughts. They direct attention to what relationships make possible. We cannot see the forest for the trees—or humanity for the individual humans.
This is why we propose Intelligence Systems (IS): systems that produce intelligence.
Intelligence is not something that a thing has. It is not situated in a particular location. It is what arises from the complex interactions of many participants in a process.
The task, then, is to use the new tool of machine intelligence to strengthen the processes through which humans already produce intelligence together. Build systems that help people understand one another, connect knowledge, test claims, preserve useful differences, and turn contributions into workable solutions.
The ambition should not be merely to build something more intelligent than us. It is to build Intelligence Systems through which we produce more intelligence together.