Toward Cognitive Interaction Architecture: Redesigning the Containers of Trust in the Age of Intelligence Explosion

Current AI development focuses on “intelligence strength” while overlooking a deeper crisis induced by AI’s role as a mediator of human relationships. When dialogue, consolation, mediation, and collaborative advice can all be generated at zero cost, trust in interpersonal relationships degrades from a locatable contract to an undecidable probability. Psychology studies interpersonal trust, computer science studies system reliability and “human-machine trust,” but the space between them—machine-mediated interpersonal trust—remains a theoretical vacuum. This paper proposes that trust is not merely a moral commitment or psychological state, but a designable cognitive infrastructure. The conditions under which trust emerges can be engineered. To support this claim, this paper provides a meta-framework that establishes a three-layer architecture of trust—structural trust, procedural trust, and meaningful trust—each matched with an engineerable foundation pillar: interest interlocking, dynamic fairness, and self-narrative. Within this framework, AI’s role shifts from being an agent or substitute for trust to becoming a cognitive container that carries the generation of human trust. A container is not emptiness, but a structured space governed by strict ethical precepts. This paper proposes a nonintervention design methodology (previously introduced in a domain-specific context under the provisional term “negative design”), explicitly arguing that refraining from translating intentions, refraining from entering causal chains, and refraining from making decisions on behalf of humans—this set of negative precepts can itself become a stronger mechanism for trust generation than positive intervention. To embody this theory, this paper presents three prototypes—First Knock, Between Us, and Consensus Capsule—strictly positioned as conceptual illustrations. They collectively adhere to the nonintervention design precepts, and their function is not to prove the theory effective, but to expose falsifiable philosophical propositions. This paper aims to provide the first citable and revisable theoretical draft for the emerging discipline of “Cognitive Interaction Architecture.” The writing posture of this paper is itself a practice of its own theory: it does not declare truth, but offers a mirror, inviting the academic community to pause and reflect together at this cognitive origin.