The columnist’s thesis
In an opinion article published in the South China Morning Post, the author starts from US President Donald Trump’s choice to use the term superintelligence, or SI, in public speeches instead of artificial intelligence. The article argues that the acronym is the right one but the meaning attributed to it is wrong. The columnist’s proposal is to read SI as self-intelligence, shifting attention from the result to the system’s ability to understand itself.
The distinction the author places at the center is between producing an intelligent response and knowing how to acquire knowledge independently. In the second case, a system should recognize what it does not know, obtain the missing information and decide how to behave safely in an unpredictable context. According to the article, this is the field’s next big challenge: moving from machine learning to a form of the machine’s self-intelligence.
A pause called for by industry insiders
The columnist connects his reading of the acronym to calls for a temporary pause in the development of artificial intelligence. These appeals, he writes, come from academics, critics and even major companies in the sector. The explanation offered is that these parties have realized that the technology’s current trajectory is taking a problematic direction.
It should be emphasized that this is an opinion-based account: the available material does not document which scholars, critics or companies made the appeals, nor with what specific arguments. The article does not report names, dates or direct quotations, so the call for a pause remains an assertion by the author and not an independently verified fact.
What is missing and why it matters
The text does not clarify what technical capabilities would be needed to achieve what the author calls self-intelligence, nor does it indicate timelines or examples of systems already capable of recognizing their own limits. No supporting data, research or experimentation is cited. The question therefore remains open as to how far the proposal describes a development already underway or is instead a programmatic goal.
The value of the reflection lies in the change of perspective: it shifts the debate from the power of answers to awareness of one’s own boundaries. It is a useful criterion for evaluating future systems, but the material provided does not allow establishing how this criterion would be measured, nor what practical consequences it would have for products, rules or responsibilities.
