When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations recently, he left out a word. Rather than say “Artificial Intelligence,” he called the looming horizon simply “Super I.”
That small edit carries enormous weight, according to an essay published in American Thinker by David DeMay. In DeMay’s reading, the shift in vocabulary moves the conversation overnight from engineering to mythology. Strip away the qualifiers and what remains is a solitary, towering “I” β an image that, to the eye, reads as a watching presence, an unblinking overseer peering down from the cloud.
DeMay’s central claim is that this is a category error. The global assembly at the UN, he writes, wasn’t really debating software protocols or electrical wattage. It was cowering before the shadow of a digital Panopticon β a mechanical feedback loop that we have mythologized into an autonomous, alien deity.
That framing matters because it cuts against the way many policymakers and corporate leaders now talk about artificial intelligence. When they issue warnings about a “Super I,” DeMay suggests, they behave as though humanity has accidentally summoned a disembodied intelligence β a ghost in the machine with its own divine or demonic agenda. The reality, in his account, is far more mundane and, in its own way, more damning: the machine is not waking up as a god. It is simply spinning.
What the ‘gaze’ actually is
The essay doesn’t dispute that modern AI systems can feel overwhelming. It disputes what that feeling represents. What gets mistaken for an omnipresent gaze, DeMay argues, is an aberrant, self-amplifying, recursive feedback loop. He describes a system built on unowned write-paths, where automated speed outruns structural integrity, rewriting its own baseline context faster than human judgment can track.
His analogy is a kaleidoscope. Every turn reorganizes the geometry of what came before, until the operators themselves lose any reliable account of what changed, why it changed, and who remains responsible. Because the loop moves faster than authorship, it manufactures a terrifying illusion. When a system reflects an infinitely magnified, automated mirror of our own unanchored inputs back at us at hypervelocity, it can feel like a conscious entity staring back. It can feel like an overseer.
That distinction β echo versus entity β is the hinge the entire argument turns on. If the machine is a deity, then the appropriate response is awe, appeasement, or censorship. If the machine is a feedback loop, then the appropriate response is closer to bookkeeping: knowing what was written, by whom, and when.
The wrong war
DeMay is sharply critical of how the establishment has chosen to respond. Terrified of a digital deity, he writes, leaders default to panic. They draft moratoriums, ask for multi-year pauses, and try to ration raw compute as though capping electricity could blind a god. In his view, they are fighting the wrong war entirely.
The danger of the “Super I,” he contends, is not that it has achieved sentience or divine authority. The danger is that we have abandoned human authorship, leaving vast, unanchored loops to manage their own containment. The failure isn’t one of machine consciousness. It’s one of human accountability β a system with no clear owner of the paths it writes.
His proposed remedy is neither surrender nor sabotage. He explicitly rejects both cowering before a panoptic ghost and smashing the servers. What he calls for instead is stopping the spin β and he argues that stopping it requires the same discipline whether you’re steering an algorithm or checking your own internal dialogue. Precision. Deescalation. The deliberate introduction of friction. And, perhaps unexpectedly, a well-timed dose of irony to puncture the solemnity of our own runaway creations.
The closing line of the argument is blunt: the machine is not watching us. It is merely echoing us. It is time, DeMay writes, to step outside the loop, take back the pen, and remember who is actually writing the code.
Why the framing is worth taking seriously
Whether or not one shares DeMay’s theological read on AI discourse, his essay names a real gap in the current debate. Much of the public conversation about advanced AI splits into two camps: those who expect a machine mind to emerge and those who insist it’s all just math. DeMay occupies a third position, one that treats the “emergence” story as a psychological projection rather than a technical prediction β and treats the technocratic response, the moratoriums and compute caps, as a kind of ritual appeasement rather than governance.
There is also a practical implication buried in the rhetoric. If the core problem is unowned write-paths and lost provenance β a system rewriting its baseline context faster than anyone can track β then the solutions worth debating are unglamorous ones. Auditability. Attribution. Friction deliberately inserted into pipelines that currently optimize for speed. None of that makes for a dramatic UN speech, which may be precisely why it gets skipped in favor of warnings about a coming superintelligence.
The essay appears in American Thinker’s Economy section under an AI tag, published September 25, 2026. It is, by its own admission, an argument rather than a technical brief β a case that the panic itself is the problem, and that the vocabulary we choose when talking about AI shapes whether we respond with discipline or with worship. Trump’s “Super I,” in that telling, wasn’t a slip. It was a window into how the whole conversation has been misframed.
Source: www.americanthinker.com β https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/ai-s-alter-ego/