Given a choice between burning natural gas and methane, most people would choose natural gas.
After all, it’s “natural”!
Methane, on the other hand, sounds like a chemical you probably shouldn’t breathe in or release into the atmosphere. The problem is that natural gas is mostly methane. But the industry markets and sells it as “natural gas” because people are far more comfortable with it. Back in 2020, Yale’s Climate Change Communications program “conducted an experiment to investigate the public’s emotions and associations regarding the terms ‘natural gas’ and ‘methane’”:
We randomly assigned respondents to one of four conditions in which each respondent was asked to rate their positive and negative feelings (affect) about one of the following four terms: “natural gas,” “natural methane gas,” “methane,” or “methane gas.”
Not surprisingly, they found:
[T]he term “natural gas” evokes much more positive feelings than do any of the three methane terms. Conversely, the terms “methane” and “methane gas” evoke much more negative feelings than does “natural gas.”
And:
The hybrid term “natural methane gas” is in the middle — it is perceived more positively than “methane” or “methane gas,” but more negatively than “natural gas.” That is, the addition of the word natural substantially increases respondents’ positive feelings about methane, indicating that the positive feelings generated by the word “natural” partially compensate for the negative feelings generated by the word “methane.”
Consequently:
Overall, “natural gas” generated the most associations to themes like energy, clean, fuel, and cooking.
By contrast, “methane,” “methane gas,” and “natural methane gas” generated the most associations to themes like gas, cows, greenhouse, global warming, and climate change.
As Mother Jones reporter Sophie Hurwitz noted earlier this year, that’s the result the industry was aiming for when it started its marketing campaign in 1971:
Throughout the 1970s, the American Gas Association, a trade group, worked with public relations firms to sell gas as a “clean” and environmentally-friendly fossil fuel. The gas industry launched a public relations campaign in 1971 called “GAS, CLEAN ENERGY FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW.” A 1972 report from the American Gas Association (AGA) said the “environmental benefits of an adequate natural gas supply are outstanding,” in that it offered a “very positive answer” to collective concern about the planet.
It’s no coincidence that the American Gas Association felt compelled to offer a “‘very positive answer’ to collective concern about the planet.” It came a year after the first Earth Day, which was a direct result of a catalytic oil spill in 1969 that threatened Southern California’s iconic shoreline. That, in turn, spawned both Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Collective concern turned into collective action and, ultimately, into government regulation. It’s exactly the sort of thing Silicon Valley would like to avoid with artificial intelligence.
So, what’s their “very positive answer” to growing questions about rapidly advancing artificial intelligence and data centers upon which AI depends?
Marketing.
A good marketing campaign begins with branding. In this case, with re-branding. It’s a simple matter of taking the “artificial” out of artificial intelligence. In this connotation, the word calls to mind the dark side of human-made stuff, like artificial colors and flavors. It sounds cold and stark and devoid of empathy or sympathy. And it sounds lifeless.
Although the antonym of artificial paired nicely with gas, “natural” intelligence is, at least for now, still the sole provenance of organic life. But it may not be long before we’re confronted with something we collectively discern as “artificial” consciousness. The perpetual adolescents currently attempting to envelop human civilization in their panoptic business model are competing to be the first to formally introduce an artificially conscious computer.
It will be their Mary Shelley moment if and when they do.
In fact, the villagers are already massing outside the castle with their pitchforks and torches. As the nationwide revolt against data centers demonstrates, they don’t like having to bear the costs of hyperscaling the infrastructure Silicon Valley needs to breathe the approximation of life into their megawatt-munching monster. It is particularly galling given AI’s value proposition, which is a job-killing “revolution in productivity.” Even worse, CEOs and whistleblowers keep on warning us that AI could engineer our demise as a species.
That’s not a compelling argument for inviting billionaires to build loudly humming data centers in our backyards.
Who better to make that case than Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant?
Make no mistake, Donald J. Trump is Silicon Valley’s Igor. He’s dutifully attended to their every need, and in return they’ve helped make him and his family very-very rich … much like the Saudis and Emiratis have done since 2016. Investors are the only constituents Trump truly cares about. Just ask Miriam Adelson. In Silicon Valley’s case, they’ve become enthusiastic investors in every one of his self-aggrandizing boondoggles and they’ve laundered money through schemes as fanciful as a $75 million documentary on Trump’s animatronic spouse.
Their return on investment has been on display over the last year as Trump repeatedly chose the Silicon Valley over MAGA nation and the Republican Party. While Texas governor and early data center enthusiast Greg Abbott announced a moratorium after putting his finger to the wind, Trump defiantly endorsed unpopular data centers. He did the same with AI and Flock surveillance cameras … and he did so after Labor Day … in an election year.
Why would Trump, whose main political gift has been an uncanny ability to channel and embody the angst and anger of his audience, go so far as to actually insult voters for rejecting the burgeoning blight of data centers?
And why would a man known for being too vain to admit defeat now torch his party’s chances during an election year?
He knows he’s on the wrong side of MAGA on Iran, Epstein and affordability. And he knows that the careening advance of AI is generating both a growing unease and a nascent anger in Red and Blue states alike. But instead of doing something concrete to assuage his vaunted MAGA base, he just doubled-down with a sales pitch for a worse-than-meaningless pledge by Silicon Valley to “self-police” their monster.
Frankly, if they wanted to “self-police,” it would already be happening. For them, the fact that they can do it is reason enough to do it, warnings of impending doom notwithstanding. That’s why no one took the pledge seriously, including the proofreader of the “morally binding” document Trump was feebly peddling to disillusioned voters on behalf of a bunch of billionaires.
They aren’t likely to buy what Trump was selling.
A Quinnipiac poll released the same day as the pledge found:
Seventy-one percent of voters say they are more likely to vote for a political candidate who supports stricter guardrails for AI development, while 16 percent say they are more likely to vote for a political candidate who supports expanding AI development, with 2 percent volunteering that there is no difference, and 11 percent not offering an opinion.
And that’s not all.
Just 25% of registered voters approve of Trump’s handling of artificial intelligence and 73% say they would “oppose the building of an AI data center in their community,” including a majority (55%) of Republicans. And when it comes to the ‘we must innovate because (gasp!) China’ argument, “nearly eight in 10 voters think safety is more important than staying at the forefront of innovation.” And just 15% of those polled “think staying at the forefront of innovation is more important than safety.”
Simply put, Americans are collectively concerned about the headlong rush into Silicon Valley’s hyperscaled hellscape of surveillance, manipulation and wealth extraction.
And they are ready to vote accordingly.
It probably explains why Trump suddenly began trying to manage the public’s perception of AI, which he kicked-off with an Executive Order (EO) directing the Federal Government to replace “artificial” with “super.” According to the EO, this change ushers in “The Era of Super Intelligence.”
That came a week after he took in upon himself to “welcome” all of humanity “to the new world of Super Intelligence” in his speech before the United Nations General Assembly. He went on to warn the world that the US “totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence,” and he opined on the methane gas-like problem with the word “artificial”:
[U]se of the word “artificial” makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake. And it is not fake. It’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents and, hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term “super” as opposed to “artificial”
Ironically, Trump appears to have unintentionally mixed some truth into his advertising. Although he appears to be using “super” as either an adjective or an adverb, its use as a prefix, as John Croxton noted on Nextgov.com, dates back over a decade:
[S]uperintelligence is already an established term in AI literature. It was popularized in philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2014 bestseller Superintelligence, which defines the term as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.”
Oddly enough, using “super” as a prefix is an all-too accurate reflection of the true intent of artificial intelligence. Etymonline describes the prefix “super” as a “word-forming element of Latin origin meaning ‘above, over’ in place or position; also in manner, degree, or measure, ‘over, beyond’."
That’s exactly what the Valley’s panopticon-men seek—an artificially-made intelligence that will rise above, over and beyond the natural intelligence of mere mortals. As The Futurist explained back in 2023, they have lofty expectations for a technology Sam Altman described then as a “magic intelligence in the sky”:
“We’re creating God,” an AI engineer working on large language models told Vanity Fair in September. “We’re creating conscious machines.”
In April, Tesla CEO and OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk — who recently launched his own AI chatbot called Grok, despite warning about the possibility of an evil AI outsmarting humans and taking over the world for many years — told Fox News that Google founder Larry Page “wanted a sort of digital super-intelligence” which would eventually become “basically a digital god, if you will, as soon as possible.”
To get there, AI is being superimposed onto every transaction, every relationship, every system and every institution. They want complete ubiquity, with an agent installed on every gadget. Many devices now come with AI pre-installed, making it harder and harder to avoid. Soon, it will have more than enough data and “compute” power to recursively “evolve” into a superintelligence that can supersede us entirely.
That’s certainly the hope of Peter Thiel, which is why everyone should be alarmed that his smarmy familiar became Trump’s Vice President. We should be equally alarmed by Thiel’s partner in Palantir, the incessantly self-promoting ghoul Alex Karp. His zeal for killing the so-called “enemies” of Western Civilization underscores the folly of inviting his ominously-named company into the Pentagon, the USDA, the IRS, ICE and, if they reach an agreement, the Social Security Administration. The same is true of all the major players—OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Amazon have all signed AI-related government contracts worth billions. By the time Trump shuffles out the Oval Office they’ll be burrowed into the Executive Branch like hungry ticks under the guise of achieving frictionless efficiency.
Perhaps that explains why Trump has done little to mitigate the epic headwinds his party will face come November. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter to Silicon Valley if voters buy what he’s selling or not. Either way, they’ll enjoy two more years of regulatory indifference and they’ll continue to reap the benefits of rubberstamp permitting and made-to-order polices implemented by executive fiat.
In other words, their investment in Trump secured a crucial regulatory holiday that allows them to accelerate the development of a “superintelligent” technological monster specifically designed to radically disrupt government, business and society. Because Trump appears willing to lose control of the House and the Senate, they can afford to do it in spite of the objections of pitchfork-wielding villagers.
Ironically, many of the regulations they’ve dodged under Trump can be traced directly back to the collective action that led to Earth Day and the EPA. The wholesale gutting of rules and regs governing climate pollution has been particularly beneficial to the power hungry man-children who can afford to build elaborate survival bunkers. But the EPA’s not content to just look the other way. As Hannah Story Brown observed in The American Prospect:
The EPA’s proposed budget for 2027 calls for a 52 percent cut, but requests $202.2 million to “support the United States becoming the global leader in AI.” The budget document also anticipates the EPA “encouraging internal expansion of AI,” including using AI for pesticide evaluations and the federal permitting process, while collaborating with “external industry partners” on powering AI data centers.
Big tech is yet another polluting industry that should be regulated by the EPA, but instead enjoys the EPA’s active cooperation in despoiling the land, the water and the air. Trump’s well-compensated acquiescence only reinforces the helpless feeling of inevitability Silicon Valley has long relied upon to impose its disruptive business model. The key is to make us dependent upon their technology before we recognize the true cost of allowing them to erect tollbooths and place surveillance devices in-between us and everything.
Before you know it, the artificial begins to feel “natural” and each new iteration—whether it’s an iPhone, an app or Agentic AI—appears to be part of a logical, evolutionary progression of technology. It doesn’t hurt that we periodically see reporting on AI’s fundamental inexplicability.
Writing for The New York Times Magazine in April, Oliver Whang explored the persistent failure to “adequately explain the superhuman abilities and strangely ingenuous behavior of A.I. models.” That inadequacy spawned “a growing field of computer science known as interpretability.” The idea is to bridge “the expanding knowledge gap between A.I. models and humans” by treating AI “more like a natural phenomenon than a human invention”:
The natural world is, after all, full of complex structures arising from unknown rules; galaxies and starfish and cancer cells are all black boxes, in a sense. Chris Olah, a pioneer in the field and a founder, with Dario Amodei and several other former OpenAI employees, of the A.I. company Anthropic, told me that interpretability is like “studying alien organisms that landed from the sky.” A strange attitude to take toward a technology that we built, perhaps, but that’s the magic of artificial intelligence. It can baffle its own creators.
There’s nothing baffling about the Zuckerborg’s post-photo op preference for “superintelligence” over both “artificial intelligence” and Trump’s “Super Intelligence,” which amounts to artificial intelligence being recast as a ”super” object or tool.
Tools are made. Beings evolve and arise.
Accepting the latter over the former is a tacit admission that AI’s mysterious cognitive abilities are the inevitable outgrowth of a natural, evolutionary process.
In reality, the version of artificial intelligence they are pushing is NOT inevitable. It has been designed rather intentionally to expand Silicon Valley’s business model, which uses disruption to create new dependencies. That’s why AI is being methodically inserted into every human interaction and endeavor. Before we know it, it will be impossible to live without an omnipresent tool of extraction and control that’s being made in the image of the Valley’s self-appointed gods. As such, it is the offspring of a small cadre of perpetual teenage boys mesmerized by eugenics, feudalism, transhumanism and a fanciful obsession with leaving Earth for Mars even as their monster’s appetite for energy and water contributes to the degradation of this planet—much like the methane that sneaks by consumers under the alias of “natural gas.”
Although it’s difficult to quantify exactly how much the American Gas Association’s marketing campaign contributed to the decades-long failure to address climate-altering gases, it has clearly shaped—and continues to shape—the public’s opinion of a leading climate pollutant.
The same will be true of “superintelligence.
That’s why we, the villagers must resist the pull of marketing and defiantly assert soulless artificiality of their intelligent monster. If we acquiesce and allow it to become a “natural,” unregulated presence in every aspect of human life, a superheated world might end up being the least of our problems.