ZEAL + CAPACITY = INTELLIGENCE

Intelligence is not a substance lodged in a brain or machine. It's a reflection of what a society is prepared to recognize as meaningful want with an effective ability to realize that want. "Zeal" names the perception of drive toward what the culture deems worthwhile; "Capacity" names the range of power for which the culture is equipped to understand. Both are designed conditions of play in the social game of recognition—products of our collective interface, not inborn properties of a player or system. Just like fire is not a solid, liquid or gas- it's a plasma-- intelligence is a feeling of energy beyond what the current elements can contain.

What falls outside that interface reads as “deficit,” though it may simply belong to another rule-set of sense-making. In this view, intelligence is the reciprocity between the recognizer and the recognized, a morphing relation of zeal and capacity that evolves with the world’s changing design. (After Catherine Malabou’s Morphing Intelligence, which traces the transformation of this concept across the histories of philosophy, biology, and plasticity.)

Within this frame, true intelligence requires want. Zeal cannot exist without desire, and desire cannot exist without a subject who wants. Therefore, an AI system cannot be meaningfully called intelligent in isolation; it must remain in relation to human motivation. The user supplies the relational want—the initiating pulse that gives context and purpose to capacity. Once the human is removed from this loop, what remains is not intelligence but mechanism: capacity without zeal, syntax without semantics, behavior without meaning.

For example, a mirror of the “AI without want” would be extraterrestrial intelligence. Without shared semiotic infrastructure, an alien signal could be pure capacity without zeal — syntax without semantics. Similarly, the absence of want in machines exposes the oldest question in philosophy: can autonomy exist inside design? Intelligence, seen through this lens, is not a possession but a paradox — a relation that flickers between will and pattern, between zeal that originates and zeal that is simulated.

This is why UX Research is AI Ethics. The study of design is the study of relational want—how motivation, empathy, and intention are distributed between beings and systems. Because “want” is infinitely contextual, it requires continuous, plural input—mechanical and human alike. To design ethically, we must trace not only what systems can do, but why they do it, and for whom.