President Trump Calls It “Super Intelligence.” The RealSuperpower Is the Human Using It.

The most important breakthrough may not be a machine becoming super intelligent. It may be teaching humans to use AI to amplify their own intelligence.

Official White House Super Intelligence luncheon image.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech mission image

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 13, 2026 – On Sept. 29, President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 14434, directing federal agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in official correspondence, public communications and websites. The order argues that today’s frontier systems increasingly go beyond simple automation and amplify human ingenuity.

The phrase has drawn attention and debate. But beneath the branding is a serious question that deserves more consideration than the terminology alone is getting: what if the real promise of super intelligence is not simply a machine becoming more capable, but a human becoming more capable because of the machine?

The language is already moving through government. NASA says it is updating its communications to incorporate the term, and its Super Intelligence pages describe SI helping the agency support missions, analyze data to reveal trends and patterns, and develop systems that can support spacecraft and aircraft autonomously. On Oct. 6 the Justice Department directed its employees to use “super intelligence” and “SI”

in public communications and policy documents, Reuters reported.

At the Artificial Intelligence Institute, that shift points toward something it has been seeing from a different direction: inside classrooms.

For two school years, the Institute has worked directly with students who already had access to extraordinarily powerful systems. In its classrooms, 78 percent were already using AI before any instruction. Only 13.6 percent had received any guidance. Students tell the Institute they began as early as second and third grade. They did not wait for schools, curriculum or policy. AI arrived on their phones, tablets, laptops and home computers, and they began using it.

The central problem was never only access. It was behavior. Give a young person a powerful systemwithout preparation and the easiest path is obvious: ask the machine to do the thinking. That is cognitive offloading.

But something very different can happen when students are deliberately taught to question first, think first, challenge what the machine produces, verify important information and stay responsible for the final result. The machine stops replacing thought. It starts amplifying it.

That is the transformation the Institute built a roughly five-hour, behaviorally structured program to produce, under its President, Dr. Russell Knight, a senior technologist of AI at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for more than 26 years. NASA granted Dr. Knight a special dispensation to develop the Institute’s behavioral science while he continues his work there. The Institute is independent of NASA, and this article reflects the

Institute’s views.

The principle is simple: Think First. AI Helps Second. The architecture behind it is more sophisticated, built on structured human-AI interaction designed to help learners build a repeatable way of using AI while keeping human judgment in command.

In the Institute’s own field data, students using AI the right way rose from 15.8% to 88%. Students verifying what AI tells them rose from 14% to 89%. Students who knew how to use it safely rose from 14% to 90%. This is first-party evidence from real classrooms, adopted by school districts, and the Institute welcomes independent evaluation. The National Science Foundation has expressed interest in the field data, and academic partners are being lined up. A collegiate aerospace-engineering student went from three semesters of struggling in calculus and physics to A’s in both after one semester with the Institute’s tutor, Professor Atlas. The Institute does not claim that five hours creates permanent neurological change. It claims that structured preparation can materially change how learners approach AI, how they question it and how much responsibility they keep for the result.

That may be where “Super Intelligence” becomes most interesting. NASA’s own materials describe systems that are most valuable when they expand what trained scientists and engineers can see, understand and accomplish. The same logic applies to education. The future is not humans versus machines, and it is not machines replacing human intelligence. It is human intelligence multiplied by machine capability.

A fourth grader who learns to hand every hard question to AI risks becoming more dependent on it. A fourth grader who learns to question it, challenge it, verify it and combine it with original thought gains something entirely different.

Public anxiety about AI is growing at the same time the technology is becoming more powerful and more embedded in daily life. Those concerns should not push America away from the technology. They should push America toward better preparation for it. The country should build the strongest systems in the world, compete aggressively and lead. But technological leadership alone is not enough. It also needs people who

know how to use those systems without surrendering judgment to them.

Perhaps that is the deeper promise inside the President’s terminology. Maybe “Super Intelligence” should not describe only what the machine becomes. Maybe it should describe what becomes possible for the human using it.

Call it amplification. Call it augmented capability. Call it Super Intelligence, provided the human remains in command.

Not humans replaced by machines. Not humans subordinate to machines. Human intelligence, amplified. And if America gets that relationship right early enough, AI may become exactly what many young people already sense it can be: a personal superpower, available on command, without giving up command.