The Abstract Machine: Public-Private-Partnerships in the implementation of artificial intelligence in the public sector

In this paper I investigate the implementation of artificial intelligence technologies (AITs) in the public sector by treating them as an assemblage. Drawing on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari I argue that AITs can be understood as a complex entanglement of necessary relations, agents, practices and concrete machinery that is stable enough to map and outline, yet always evolving and changing. Moreover I argue that this assemblage primarily advances private interests and capitalist logics even as it is often articulated as a tool for the public sector in general and citizens in particular. By utilizing data from a political ethnography of how AITs are implemented through public-private-partnerships in the Swedish public sector I aim to illustrate three parts of the assemblage. First, I detail what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the abstract machine, or the grid of relations that are laid out as a set of necessary conditions for the assemblage to operate in the first place. Second, I account for the heterogenous parts that make up the physical manifestations of AITs as they are being deployed throughout the Swedish public sector. This includes their infrastructure, the important practices that sustains them and examples of particular hardware and software needed to make the AITs functional. Following Deleuze and Guattari we may label this second step an outline of the concrete assemblage. Third, I focus on particularly important agents of the assemblage that advance its rationalities and embody its development trajectory - its personae. In this case, these agents are often private consultants, or diffuse, new forms of civil servants that deviate significantly from the Weberian ideals often associated with the bureaucrat. Thus, the operators of this assemblage cannot be classified as neutral bureaucrats following ideals such as hierarchical structures, division of labor, clearly defined rules and regulation, meritocracy and record-keeping. The paper then concludes with a discussion on the political economy of the assemblage formed around the implementation of AITs in Sweden as I argue that it enables new and profound forms of marketization in what is already a highly marketized public sector. This, in turn may have political and democratic effects that can turn out to be contradictory to the promises of the prevailing discourse of digitalization and AI.