This concept grew out of a single obsession: how do humans hold on to meaning when the ground beneath us won’t stop shifting?

For years, I’ve been building worlds—some fictional, some strategic—all designed to capture the fractures of our time. Antherra, the creative engine I’ve poured myself into, began as an experiment: could an idea scale without losing its signal? The deeper I went, the clearer one truth became—every system, whether a story, a business, or a society, lives or dies by the clarity of its interface.

Some of this came to me in quiet research. Some of it came on porches in Ohio, sitting late into the night with my creative partner, turning jokes into questions that suddenly got serious: What happens when the algorithm knows us better than we know ourselves? What’s left of being human when every decision runs through a dashboard? Those weren’t idle musings. They were early signals of what we all feel now: something essential is at risk of being lost in translation between us and our machines.

This is not a concept of technical specifications. It isn’t a manifesto against AI, either. It is a field guide for discernment. A way to notice the fractures that are already here—in healthcare, in classrooms, in workplaces, in governance—and to practice staying human in their midst.

I call this practice IIQ—the Interface Intelligence Quotient™. It’s not another test to take, or a buzzword to collect. It’s a literacy. A way of pausing, questioning, and re-grounding at the boundary between us and our tools.

If you find yourself nodding in agreement, resisting in frustration, or simply pausing as you read—that pause is the point. The pause is where discernment begins.

This is not a concept about machines.
It is a concept about us.

—Chris A. Piazza

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