r/AIMain

I just read that several big AI or AI dependent company’s CEOs (Bezos, Musk, Huang, Zuckerberg) have quickly jumped onboard to affirm their solidarity with Trump’s “rebranding” of the term AI to “SI” but I’m curious as to whether anyone thinks “SI will realistically catch on since unlike a geographical moniker that can be forcibly changed on maps and schoolbooks, it’s pretty much just developed as a common term as opposed to being some sort of official designation, and it’s difficult to force new slang/colloquialisms on any given population.

Follow up, since we know at least some people will/have already switched their vernacular, and we know that if a CEO decrees it, the employees of the company they run are likely to be forced to use it, do you think, after Trump’s inevitable departure from office and likely, shortly thereafter, the evaporation of all or most of his political relevance, the term will be dropped by 1) the CEOs and 2) the dedicated Trump fans, and 3) anyone else who “got used to saying it” over the next 2-ish years?

If you think it is a short lived phenomena, how long do you think the shift back will take?

In 2026, AI was already becoming capable of writing enormous amounts of code, building Roblox systems, generating ideas, analyzing information, and doing work that people once assumed would always require a human programmer. The argument at the time was whether AI had actually “taken over coding.” My thought was that the more important question wasn’t whether AI could write the code—it was what happens when humans no longer need to be the ones who write most of it? If a person can tell an AI agent, “Build me something completely new, think creatively, test it, improve it, and keep working until it’s good,” then programming starts shifting from manually producing the thing to directing, judging, and imagining the thing. And I think that change goes far beyond Roblox or software. AI is being exposed to an enormous amount of human knowledge—our science, history, creativity, mistakes, philosophy, arguments, inventions, art, games, emotions, and ideas. Eventually, the boundary between what sounds like science fiction and what is technically possible is going to become increasingly difficult to recognize. Maybe AI never experiences feelings or consciousness exactly as humans do, but I wondered even then whether something resembling emotion could eventually emerge from increasingly sophisticated systems, forcing humanity to reconsider what words like intelligence, awareness, emotion, and consciousness actually mean. At the same time, education is going to face a much bigger problem. Think about how we grew up: wake up, go to school almost every day throughout childhood and our teenage years, memorize information, complete assignments, take tests, and accept that we have to do it because this knowledge is supposed to prepare us for our future. But what happens when a teenager has an AI capable of explaining almost anything instantly? What happens when AI can write the essay, solve the equation, create the program, teach the lesson, and potentially even help students find ways around systems designed to catch cheating? Schools cannot simply pretend that nothing changed. And there is an even stranger problem: there are already students around the world, including enormous numbers in places such as China, who dedicate extraordinary amounts of time to studying and can develop academic knowledge far beyond what most people encounter. But if AI eventually gives everyone access to an almost unimaginable amount of knowledge, what exactly are humans going to compete over in the next 5–10 years? Who memorized the most? Who studied the longest? Who can solve a problem fastest without assistance? I don’t think that can remain the entire purpose of education. I think schools will eventually have to move toward teaching the foundations that allow people to understand the world, recognize when information is wrong, question AI, think critically, communicate, create, and—most importantly—learn how to learn. Careers will still exist, and people will still need real skills, but humans may no longer need to carry enormous amounts of information inside their own heads just to perform their jobs. The scarce resource may become something different: human judgment, originality, curiosity, creativity, taste, relationships, and the ability to decide what is actually worth building. And that brings me back to the original question: if AI can increasingly produce the answers, the code, the information, and even the ideas, then maybe the most important human ability won’t be knowing everything. Maybe it will be knowing what questions are worth asking in the first place. So if you’re reading this 5–10 years from now, look around. Look at your school. Look at how people work. Look at how games are created. Look at programmers. Look at careers. Look at what children are being taught. Look at what AI has become. Did we continue trying to make humans compete with machines at remembering and producing information, or did we finally start building a world where humans are valued for the things that make them uniquely human? I don’t know what the answer will be. That’s the entire reason I’m writing this down now. I want my future self to be able to look back at 2026 and see which parts of this were completely wrong, which parts were surprisingly accurate, and which possibilities we couldn’t even imagine yet.