A Name Short Enough to Use

A Name Short Enough to Use

I wondered what little birthday present President Trump might have for me. There is usually some tidbit on Truth Social for one and all, something that makes me stop and think, Oh, what is this? He did not disappoint.

China has never been abstract to me. I have followed Stephen Mosher’s work since the 1990s, and I have been writing about him and China on these pages since 2019.¹ I keep a rosary made and smuggled out by the underground, persecuted Catholic Church there. It came through Population Research Institute, and Stephen Mosher gave it to me.

The rosary that got out.

I use it on Sundays, our mini-Easters, on feast days, and on days that seem to ask for those particular beads. Had I absorbed yesterday what was happening in Washington, those would have been the beads in my hands this morning. Instead, I found the present a little late: President Trump and President Xi, China on the South Lawn, all the pomp and ceremony, the state dinner, and two men whose decisions can move an astonishing amount of the earth sitting down together. I have already written about what it means simply to see great powers sit down, speak carefully, and signal restraint.²

This time, of all things, the Machine was at the table, and they were talking about its name. Who would have thought that the question of what to call this thing would command time at that level? They may not keep Super Intelligence. They may not like the letters SI when the week is over. That is almost beside the point. The name itself had reached that room.

I have been on that question since June in Naming the Machine.³ Trump entered it only recently. He objects to artificial. He thinks it makes the technology sound fake. I welcomed the challenge to the received name, but my objection goes deeper. Change the adjective and the noun remains. It is still not intelligence.⁴

Before the meeting Trump said Super Intelligence would be a major subject. Xi’s own language was different: dialogue, preventing misuse, keeping the technology “under human control.” Trump later said Xi seemed to like his new name. That is Trump’s account, not an announced Chinese adoption of SI.⁵ The letters, however, are not what caught me. Two presidents of two great powers had given high-profile time to what this thing is, what it will do, how human beings will govern it, and even what we will call it.

There, I think, are two different jobs. They need a name short enough to use. I need a vocabulary accurate enough to think with.

Presidents and diplomats need a handle that fits a toast, a readout, a headline. I need words that let us think about the thing without lying to ourselves. That is an older concern of mine than the Machine. Years ago, writing through the Pre-Socratics, I came back to adaequatio intellectus et rei, the correspondence of the mind to the thing.⁶ A vocabulary that falsifies the thing will eventually falsify our thinking about it.

With Ted I may call it a model. In public I call it the Machine. I call the installations that run it plants because Texans understand plants: land, water, power, neighbors. I also call the Machine a tool. Last week I wrote that “a tool keeps the human being in the sentence.” I have called it “a tool for reasoning.”⁷ This morning I think I can say it more precisely: it is a tool people reason with.

The grammar matters. Not a “reasoning machine,” which quietly hands the verb to the object. People reason. We ask the next question. We refuse the first answer when it does not hold. We go back to the evidence, make distinctions, judge what is true, and decide what to do. The tool is what we reason with.

I have had recent reason to be profoundly grateful that I had already learned how to use it before I needed it. I will leave the circumstances there. The Machine did not think instead of me. The better I learned to work with it, the more human judgment mattered, not less.

Perhaps the language simply has not caught up. The automobile was a horseless carriage while the thing itself was already on the road. Our Machine is already on the road too.

One more thing from the day, and then I will file it. The press was frozen out of a historic meeting between the presidents of the United States and China, and the meeting went forward without them. The work went on. Institutions can mistake their accustomed place in a process for indispensability. Then the work routes around them. I noticed.

Here I am on my birthday with the rosary that got out sitting nearby, China before me again, two presidents giving their time to what we should call this thing, and the Machine I have spent these months trying to name. They need a name short enough to use. I need a vocabulary accurate enough to think with. People still need to do the reasoning.

What a present.

What a time to be alive.

Notes

1. “China News Special Report: Mosher & Epoch Times Interview,” Fides et Ratio (2019). “I have been aware of Mosher’s work since the 1990’s. The rosary shown is from his organization, Population Research Institute. The rosary was made and smuggled out by the underground-persecuted Catholic Church.”
2. “A Historic Realignment Before Our Eyes,” Fides et Ratio, May 14, 2026.
3. “Naming the Machine — Artificial Intelligence and the Human Person,” Fides et Ratio, June 10, 2026.
4. “Trump Wants to Rename the Machine,” Fides et Ratio, September 19, 2026.
5. President Donald Trump, remarks and social-media statement surrounding the September 24, 2026 meeting with President Xi Jinping; President Xi Jinping, remarks at the White House, September 24, 2026. Xi called for dialogue, preventing misuse, and keeping the technology “under human control.” Trump’s statement that Xi “seemed to like” the new name is Trump’s characterization.
6. “Pre-Socratics,” Fides et Ratio, February 15, 2018; St. Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 1, a. 1; Summa theologiae I, q. 16, a. 1.
7. “Trump Wants to Rename the Machine,” Fides et Ratio, September 19, 2026.