I arrived a little early for the interview in order to get a feel for the surroundings. The company was supposedly a startup but it had already taken over several of the floors of the new business center in town. The place was foreign territory for me, I had finished my postgraduate at a different uni, in a different city but my final paper was very relevant for this particular company. It was based on the joint topics of AI and sex.
The CEO, Joanna Morley met me at the reception and escorted me upstairs to the interview room. She was in her 40s and looked just as poised and as elegant as in her Ted talks. The woman was already a huge role model for me, though I knew it was probably best not to say in case it looked like fawning. As I stood in the elevator beside her, I took the chance to check her out up close, such a nice cut of suit, such a crisp, well fitting blouse. This is how I wanted to be when I reached middle age.
She led me to her office and signaled for me to take a seat, it was a small utilitarian room full of the kind of organized clutter so typical of academics. The blinds were held up on the window sill by ringed binders and cardboard folders. This was a women who had come from the same world as me and had excelled in it.
"So Annabelle, I imagine you'll have a better idea than most about what we do here, but I am also sure you've heard some of the rumors too," she said, "I would like to describe the company in my own words, just so we are completely clear."
There was something about her manner that oozed confidence and competence.
"Much like your own research, our organization has been measuring and examining the neurological affects of sexual arousal, mapping the outputs and then training a deep learning model with the results. The difference is we have been doing it at a vastly larger scale with significantly more resources. To the point were we have developed - well really quite a powerful model. Our own neural network essentially."
I cut in, "That's wonderful, I would be absolutely fascinated to see the results, my research brought up so many aberrations and I would just love to see the data."
She smiled, "Perhaps some of what you saw was not an aberration, this new model has produced some brand new insights."
I was intrigued, this was an area of research, few 'real' scientists liked to get into, but the science of sexual desire still held many unanswered questions. And now AI had provided us with powerful new tools to find the answers. We were at the beginning of a new resurgence in the field, not seen since the days of Alfred Kinsey. I felt very lucky to be at the heart of it now.
"Are you able to share your findings," I asked.
'well after years of measurement from subjects in all different states of arousal - a process that, I have to say, has painted this company in infamy - we've been able to isolate a kind of signal. It's something transmitted though all the senses, sight, sound, touch - smell even - but the end result is the same. A common kind of pattern, one that varies from individual to individual but with certain characteristics which seem almost universal'.
"I remember seeing patterns like that, but I could never pin them down."
"Well that's what impressed me about you, its incredibly hard to do. The AI needs to be very advanced to learn and, of course, extracting enough data is very difficult. The stories I could tell you about what goes on behind some of these doors. Its been a journey I can tell you. However we can now recreate the same pattern in our own software and use it to reliably stimulate arousal on any individual. That part is relatively simple, just stream the pattern in the form of a pulse. Essentially we have built a kind of electronic aphrodisiac. Its quite hard to describe, but it is extremely powerful."
"That is fascinating," I said, "I'd love to see it in action"
"Well, of course, I expect you would - but first, can I ask you a personal question?"
"Uh sure," I said
"You'll need to get used to personal questions working here," she leaned forward into a kind of whisper, "what's the most aroused you have ever been, cast your mind back to the moment you were at your most horny, the most 'turned on' in your entire life."
"Goodness, that's a tricky one," I said, "it wouldn't have been during an orgasm, that's for sure."
She smiled, "ha, no, an orgasm is rarely at the peak, a fairly common misunderstanding. If you were to draw a bell curve of arousal, you could draw a line through the middle, if you happen to be one of the lucky ones who actually 'can' orgasm, then it could happen anytime really during that peak. But that's not the full story, as you probably know. Have you ever been so aroused, that you simply can't help yourself. A lot of people have a story like that, usually in their early years. Some circumstance where you were too turned on to function correctly. Terrible time to make decision, so easy to make a late night calls to your ex."
"The science of the booty call," I laughed.
In truth I have felt that way many times, alone in my bedroom bouncing off the walls. Over many lonely nights but sometimes also during the day, I remember the year at Uni I was obsessed with my lecturer, Dr Buchanan. I would put on my shortest summer dress during lectures and sit at the front, I just loved drawing in his admiring glances as he talked to the entire room. He had such mischievous eyes and was a brilliant flirt but was unfortunately married. Still one time after class, we had a conversation so intense, the mutual desire was just palpable. I remember rushing to the toilets after I left the room just to bring myself off, I was so aroused - it took seconds.
"I can picture a time," I said
"Right, good, I wont ask you about it, instead cast your mind back to how you felt then, how in control you were."
"Not very," if Dr Buchanan had wanted to, I thought, he could have had me right there on that desk. I wouldn't have cared if the door was unlocked.
"This is what we urgently need to investigate at the moment, and thankfully now we have a tool which can make you feel that way again almost instantly."
"Can I see it," I asked.
"I have one in my desk I can show you, but I am really not supposed to."
"You're the CEO!" I laughed
"True, but at this moment in time this tool might be too dangerous even for me," her tone was not as droll as it might have been as she opened up the the bottom drawer. Out of which she pulled, simply an old iPhone with a cable attached, it split in two like old fashioned wired earphones but instead of buds there was small metal cylinders attached to each wire. Like two small silver tubular bells.
"This is it," she said, "Doesn't look like much, does it."
"The power is in the software not the hardware, I suppose."
"And the software has now been completely locked down since the last iteration. I don't mind saying it has raised a lot of moral quandaries and since the lockdown, all of us have been treading water, until we figure out what to do."
"Did something happen?" I asked.
"Well, the whole company has been playing far too fast and loose with this technology. Its my fault really, I have been presiding over a culture here which up to now has valued only experimentation and fun. Imagine, if in the early days of dynamite, the pioneers throwing sticks at each other, smoking cigarettes around the factory, that sort of thing. But then, yes something did happen. Last week we had an incident in the canteen. Many of our staff had this app on their own phone, nothing unusual in that, we need to try out our own products right. But when the latest iteration came out. Some of the lab team were playing with it over lunch, then.. the way they ended up, in front of half the team. It was pretty embarrassing for them and trust me, people around here don't get embarrassed too easily."
I was shocked but also intrigued. Just how powerful was this thing?
