Assembling Intelligence: Transitioning from a Politics of Control to a Politics of Configuration

The concept of intelligence is deeply ambiguous and entangled with historical narratives of colonialism and eugenics. The contemporary understanding of intelligence still reflects such narratives: it is understood in human-centric terms, as a property defined by goal-oriented cognitive capacities. This leads to what we term a politics of control, which relies on historically established patterns of exclusion to establish political structures with colonial connotations. In response, this paper proposes an alternative framework called the Assemblage Theory of Intelligence (ATOI). ATOI understands intelligence in terms of the dynamic relationships and activities within an assemblage and moves us from a politics of control to a politics of configuration. We illustrate ATOI through a discussion of the human-in-the-loop (HITL) methodology in AI development. Contrary to the dominant narrative, where humans are seen as controlling the loop, we reconceive HITL as an assemblage where human and machine elements configure and mutually shape each other.