The U.S. Census Bureau and “Super Intelligence”
The U.S. Census Bureau and “Super Intelligence”
The article highlights a significant discontinuity in U.S. government data collection regarding technological adoption, caused by the U.S. Census Bureau aligning its survey instruments with Executive Order 14434. This directive mandated a rebranding of "Artificial Intelligence" to "Super Intelligence" in official statistics. Consequently, the historical continuity of key datasets, such as the Business Trends and Outlook Survey, has been compromised. Businesses previously surveyed on AI usage are now being asked about Super Intelligence, creating a break in the data series that makes direct year-over-year comparisons impossible without careful adjustment for the semantic shift. This change obscures the true pace of corporate technology integration by conflating existing AI capabilities with speculative or redefined "Super Intelligence." The apparent surge in reported adoption rates between late 2025 and late 2026 is largely an artifact of the broadened question scope—moving from production-specific use to "any business function"—rather than genuine exponential growth. This demonstrates how policy-driven changes to terminology can artificially inflate metrics, masking the nuanced reality of how technologies are actually being deployed in the private sector. For open data initiatives, this case is a critical warning about the fragility of longitudinal datasets when political or administrative definitions change abruptly. It underscores the necessity for data archivists and analysts to maintain strict metadata records regarding survey methodology and wording changes. Without transparent documentation of these shifts, researchers risk drawing erroneous conclusions from corrupted time series, highlighting the need for rigorous provenance tracking in public data repositories.
Source: simonwillison.netPublished on 2026-11-03
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