IMAGE by Zach Jiroun
As intelligence becomes ambient, presence must become intentional.
The CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic have all made bold predictions: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could arrive within the next five years. AGI isn’t just a smarter version of today’s AI. It refers to systems with human-level (or even superhuman) intelligence, capable of understanding, learning, and adapting across a broad range of tasks.
In short: AGI doesn’t wait for input. It anticipates. It acts.
Imagine daily life embedded with systems that preempt your needs, automate your tasks, and adapt to your rhythms. Sounds helpful, until invisible decisions start being made on our behalf. A world where our attention is no longer fragmented by screens, but by systems.
The Quiet Cost of Automation
AGI systems promise ease, but often at the cost of mental clarity. As interfaces disappear and automation becomes seamless, cognitive load doesn’t vanish, it migrates. From managing screens and menus to managing meaning, motivation, and presence. Users may be flooded with ultra-personalized suggestions, constantly adapting workflows, and tools that always want a piece of their attention.
When everything is adaptive, the user becomes perpetually responsive. Not to tasks, but to the system itself.
We risk entering an age of quiet chaos: where opting out becomes harder than engaging, where silence must be earned, and where attention is taxed not by noise, but by subtle nudges and predictive systems.
Janlert and Stolterman take a critical look at interactivity, challenging the assumption that it’s always beneficial. They explore how digital interfaces shape our attention and behavior, from the shift from physical knobs to touch gestures to the broader implications for our well-being. By dissecting the elements of interaction design, they argue that understanding interactivity’s core principles is essential for shaping its future. It’s a thought-provoking book for designers and technologists interested in the deeper impact of digital interactions.
Control in a Post-Interface World
Designing for AGI means rethinking user control. In increasingly automated environments, many interaction steps disappear. The user no longer clicks “start”, the system starts for them.
As explained in Things That Keep Us Busy by Lars-Erik Janlert and Erik Stolterman, automation reduces the user’s role from controller to goal-setter. The artifact or system takes over, executing tasks based on inferred intentions.
But when users no longer act explicitly, systems must gather that information elsewhere, either by scanning the environment or by modeling the user. The first approach assumes clear goals and reliable context sensing. The second requires interpreting user behavior, even unintentional signals.
Both methods are risky. When systems misread us, they don’t just annoy, they disempower. The user becomes one data point among many. One guide in a sea of signals. Modeled, but not supported. Predicted, but not understood.
This is the moment Calm Design must take a stand.
IMAGE by Vadim Sherbakov
What Calm Design Offers in the Age of AGI
Calm Design isn’t nostalgic or anti-automation. It’s a framework for reclaiming presence in the face of overwhelming intelligence.
Designing for calm in the age of AGI means creating intentional silence. Spaces where nothing happens, where users are not being nudged, predicted, or prompted. It means supporting withdrawal from AI-driven loops, and preserving the user’s right to rest, reflect, and disconnect.
Calm Design in this new context must:
- Fade into the background when not needed
- Offer clear exits, not just endless options
- Provide real moments of user control, not just perceived control
- Encourage mindful engagement over reflexive interaction
- Support human presence, not digital performance
Principles for Slowing Down AGI-Driven Interactions
- Design for Interruptibility Make systems easy to pause, snooze, or go quiet. Users should be able to interrupt the machine, not the other way around.
- Favor Defaults That Defer Avoid aggressive personalization or suggestion loops. Default settings should respect autonomy.
- Give Feedback, Not Just Feedforward Help users reflect on their usage. Offer insights, not just predictions.
- Create Silent States Introduce quiet UI modes, intentional time-outs, and moments of stillness. Design rest into the system.
IMAGE by Photo by Marc Eggert
Rethinking Attention in a World That Acts Without Us
In today’s UX, attention is mostly about managing what’s on a screen—how many steps a task takes, how intuitive a layout is, how easily a user can find something.
But in a future with AGI, the interaction itself is often invisible. You don’t click or type—the system just does things for you. So the new cognitive load isn’t about friction or confusion, it’s about:
- Interpreting what the system is doing on your behalf,
- Understanding why it did it,
- Figuring out whether you agree with it,
- And deciding how (or if) to correct it.
Which means attention management becomes existential—it’s no longer “how do I complete this task?” but rather:
- “Who’s actually making the decisions here?”
- “Am I still in control?”
- “Is this system still working for me?”
Calm Design must evolve. Not by stripping things down to nothing, but by supporting users in navigating opaque processes, understanding system intent, and choosing when and how to engage.
A Design Imperative
Calm is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity.
In an AGI world, our tools will be fast, responsive, and always on. But we—humans—don’t have to be. We must build systems that honor attention, preserve silence, and re-center the human in the loop.
Because when intelligence becomes ambient, presence must become intentional.
That is the promise of Calm Design in the age of AGI.
