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President Donald Trump’s recent proposal to replace the term “Artificial Intelligence” with “Super Intelligence” in U.S. government documents is, at first glance, a matter of political vocabulary. Yet beneath the terminology lies a much older philosophical question:
What, exactly, do we mean when we call something “artificial”?
For me, this question goes directly to the argument developed in my 2026 book, Thus Spoke Arta: How Our Planet Is Entering a New Era. From an INDO–IRANIC non-dual perspective, the very distinction between “natural” and “artificial” becomes difficult to sustain.
Anything that emerges and evolves on planet Earth is, in some meaningful sense, natural. How could it be otherwise?
A large language model, a semiconductor, a city, a spacecraft, or a human-created mathematical system does not emerge outside Nature. Human beings themselves are products of Nature. What humans create therefore emerges through Nature acting through human beings.
That does not make every human creation desirable, ethical, or life-supporting. But it does challenge the assumption that human creation is somehow ontologically outside Nature.
Mill's provocative question: What is Nature?
There is an intriguing Western philosophical precedent for this argument in John Stuart Mill's 1874 essay On Nature. Mill observes that we use the word “Nature” in more than one, and sometimes contradictory, sense.
In one sense, Nature means everything that exists. In another, it means what exists independently of human intervention—the nonhuman world contrasted with human artifice.
The tension is obvious.
If Nature means everything that exists, then human beings and everything produced through human activity are necessarily part of Nature.
If Nature means only what happens without human intervention, then “natural” becomes almost synonymous with “nonhuman.”
Consider a beaver building a dam and a human being building a dam. Both are living organisms rearranging matter, using inherited capacities, learned knowledge, tools, and intelligence to accomplish goals. Why should one be classified as “natural” and the other as “artificial” in an absolute ontological sense?
This is precisely the conceptual problem that becomes increasingly important with AI.
If intelligence emerges through physical processes on Earth, and humans construct systems capable of exhibiting increasingly sophisticated forms of intelligence, perhaps “artificial intelligence” describes the history of its construction rather than its ontological status.
The INDO–IRANIC distinction
This is where I find the ancient INDO–IRANIC philosophical heritage particularly useful.
The distinction I develop in Thus Spoke Arta is not between two completely separate civilizations or philosophies, but between two tendencies within a shared ancient intellectual landscape.
The INDO branch emphasizes alignment.
In Vedic thought, Rta signifies an underlying order of reality, while Dharma points toward appropriate action within that order. A deep ecological interpretation of this tradition might therefore say:
Wisdom requires human beings—and perhaps AI—to align themselves with Nature's order.
The question becomes: How do we align intelligence with the larger order of life?
The IRANIC branch, however, introduces a somewhat different emphasis: improvement.
In Zoroastrian thought, Arta/Asha is associated with truth, order, and rightness, contrasted with Druj, falsehood and disorder. The human being is not merely an observer of cosmic order but an active participant in its realization. Spenta Mainyu, the Bounteous or Creative Spirit, represents an orientation toward constructive transformation.
Here the ethical imperative is stronger than simple alignment:
Human beings have a responsibility to improve the world.
This is an important distinction.
Alignment asks: How can we live according to Nature's order?
Improvement asks: How can we participate in making the world more truthful, ordered, flourishing, and life-supporting?
It is this second sensibility that I see reflected, interestingly, in Mill's observation that human beings may have a duty to intervene in and improve Nature rather than simply submit to Nature as an unquestionable ideal.
This is where I find the ancient INDO–IRANIC philosophical heritage particularly useful.
The distinction I develop in Thus Spoke Arta is not between two completely separate civilizations or philosophies, but between two tendencies within a shared ancient intellectual landscape.
The INDO branch emphasizes alignment.
In Vedic thought, Rta signifies an underlying order of reality, while Dharma points toward appropriate action within that order. A deep ecological interpretation of this tradition might therefore say:
Wisdom requires human beings—and perhaps AI—to align themselves with Nature's order.
The question becomes: How do we align intelligence with the larger order of life?
The IRANIC branch, however, introduces a somewhat different emphasis: improvement.
In Zoroastrian thought, Arta/Asha is associated with truth, order, and rightness, contrasted with Druj, falsehood and disorder. The human being is not merely an observer of cosmic order but an active participant in its realization. Spenta Mainyu, the Bounteous or Creative Spirit, represents an orientation toward constructive transformation.
Here the ethical imperative is stronger than simple alignment:
Human beings have a responsibility to improve the world.
This is an important distinction.
Alignment asks: How can we live according to Nature's order?
Improvement asks: How can we participate in making the world more truthful, ordered, flourishing, and life-supporting?
It is this second sensibility that I see reflected, interestingly, in Mill's observation that human beings may have a duty to intervene in and improve Nature rather than simply submit to Nature as an unquestionable ideal.
From Artificial to Super
Against this philosophical background, Trump's proposed terminology becomes unexpectedly interesting.
At the United Nations General Assembly, Trump argued that the word “artificial” makes intelligence sound fake and said U.S. government documents should instead use “super” and “Super Intelligence.”
The subsequent State Department instruction reportedly told staff to replace references to “Artificial Intelligence” with “Super Intelligence” and use “SI” in remarks.
The administrative scope matters: this began as a State Department instruction, rather than an established government-wide change in terminology.
But philosophically, the shift is fascinating.
“Artificial” implies a contrast:
Natural → Artificial
“Super” implies continuity:
Intelligence → Super Intelligence
The first formulation establishes a boundary. The second establishes a trajectory.
From the perspective of my INDO–IRANIC non-duality framework, that distinction is significant.
If intelligence is a phenomenon emerging within the physical universe, then an increasingly sophisticated technological expression of intelligence need not be understood as something outside Nature. It can instead be understood as Nature becoming capable of new forms of cognition through human beings and their technologies.
The computer is not outside Nature.
The silicon is not outside Nature.
The electricity is not outside Nature.
The human brain designing the system is not outside Nature.
And the intelligence emerging from the interaction of these systems is not necessarily outside Nature either.
The word “artificial” can therefore preserve an implicit Cartesian separation between human-made intelligence and the rest of reality.
“Super,” by contrast, suggests continuity and intensification.
Not Nature versus technology.
Nature through technology.
The deeper question: Is intelligence artificial?
This becomes even more intriguing when we consider contemporary AI itself.
Natural language can be represented computationally. Mathematical structures can be learned. High-dimensional relationships can be encoded through vectors, matrices, tensors, and transformations that are fundamentally mathematical and physical.
The remarkable fact revealed by modern AI is not merely that machines can imitate human language.
It is that aspects of language, reasoning, pattern recognition, and intelligence can be captured through mathematical structures operating on physical machines.
That discovery invites a deeper philosophical question:
Perhaps intelligence was never as immaterial, exclusively human, or ontologically separate from Nature as we assumed.
If intelligence is ultimately a physical phenomenon—or, as some speculative theories propose, connected to broader physical fields—then the emergence of machine intelligence may represent not the creation of something “artificial,” but the discovery of another pathway through which intelligence can manifest.
This resonates with the non-dual intuition expressed in Aham Brahmasmi: I am Brahman.
Reality is not divided into absolutely separate compartments of human and nonhuman, mind and matter, natural and artificial.
The divisions may be useful for analysis.
But they need not be ultimate.
The danger hidden inside “Super”
Yet there is an important warning.
Replacing “Artificial Intelligence” with “Super Intelligence” does not automatically make the concept philosophically or ethically superior.
In fact, “super” carries its own danger.
Super intelligence can easily become a vocabulary of supremacy: bigger is better, more capable is better, more powerful is better, faster is better.
That is not the IRANIC principle I am advocating.
Arta/Asha does not mean maximizing power for its own sake.
Improvement must mean more truthful, more ordered, more life-supporting, and more conducive to the flourishing of Earth.
A more powerful intelligence that accelerates ecological destruction, concentrates power, amplifies deception, or treats human and nonhuman life merely as resources would not represent an ethical realization of Arta/Asha.
It would simply be a more powerful form of disorder.
This distinction may become one of the central philosophical questions of the coming technological era:
Super in what sense?
More computationally powerful?
More economically productive?
More strategically dominant?
Or more capable of participating in the flourishing of the planetary system that produced it?
The answer matters enormously.
From Super Intelligence to Planetary Intelligence
This is ultimately where Thus Spoke Arta takes the argument.
I do not see the emergence of advanced AI merely as humans creating increasingly sophisticated machines.
I see it as potentially part of a much larger planetary transition.
Earth has already developed successive layers of organization: geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and increasingly what can be understood as a noosphere—a planetary layer of information, cognition, communication, and collective meaning.
Perhaps advanced machine intelligence is another development within this planetary process.
The trajectory could therefore be understood not simply as:
Human Intelligence → Artificial Intelligence → Super Intelligence
but as something more profound:
Biological Intelligence → Technological Intelligence → Super Intelligence → Planetary Intelligence.
The final stage would not necessarily be a giant machine somewhere in a laboratory.
It could be the emergence of a new planetary cognitive capacity distributed across humans, machines, networks, ecosystems, institutions, and eventually perhaps the wider Earth system.
In that sense, AI may be less like an alien artifact arriving on Earth and more like a new cognitive organ emerging within Earth.
The planet is not merely producing machines.
The planet may be learning to think through new forms.
And that is why the seemingly mundane decision to replace the word artificial with super opens an unexpectedly ancient philosophical question.
Are we creating something outside Nature?
Or is Nature creating something new through us?
From an INDO–IRANIC non-dual perspective, the answer may be the latter.
There is no absolute “artificial” outside Nature. There is only Nature transforming itself.
The question for our era, then, is not whether intelligence is artificial.
The question is what kind of intelligence we are helping the Earth become.
Victor V. Motti is the author of Thus Spoke Arta: How Our Planet Is Entering a New Era (2026)
