Cyborg anthropologist Amber Case argues that technology should quietly support human life rather than dominate our attention. Contrasting clock-driven “Chronos” time with meaningful “Kairos” time, she explains how smartphones, unstable interfaces, and AI can disconnect us from our bodies, surroundings, creativity, and direct experience while requiring constant maintenance. Through calm technology—durable, intuitive, unobtrusive tools designed around human senses—Amber envisions objects that people can master, value, and preserve. The conversation also explores nature’s influence on creativity, technology hype throughout history, the cognitive risks of outsourcing skills to AI, and the fragility of digital culture, emphasizing the need for physical engagement, better questions, resilient archives, and technologies that serve humanity rather than dictate how people live. Amber is the author of the book Calm Technology.

Amber Case:

I created this certification called Calm Tech Certified that’s looking at the primary attention it takes to do something, your secondary attention… you know, the durability, does it work when it fails or does it become e-waste? Light, does it shine a bright blue light into your face when you’re trying to sleep? Is there diffusion on the LED? How does it sound? Does it sound like a microwave or not? What are the materials? Is it just some low quality plastic, or is there a wood facade on it? And how are the buttons articulated? This is my attempt to maybe try to get us out of this very temporary, like neo-Victorian era, in which our lives are filled with so many objects, but very few of them do we treasure. And getting back into an era in which we would care about what objects we make, and there’s an industrial design idea on how we could make these. That we carve them out of balsa wood first, and we then try different shapes and forms in the three-dimensional space, and we let our hands do the understanding versus CADCAM software and how it looks.