I arrived a little early for the interview in order to get a sense of the place. The company I had come to see – ‘Neurosentia’ – was supposedly a startup but had already taken over several of the floors of the tower building connected to the University here. This place was foreign territory for me, I had finished my postgraduate at a different uni altogether but my doctorate was very much in line with the interests of this particular company, the pairing of AI and sex.
Joanna Simmonds met me at the reception and escorted me upstairs to the interview room. CTO and co-founder, she was in her early 40s and looked just as poised and as elegant as in her YouTube videos. This woman was already a huge role model for me, though I knew better than to mention it. I did not want to appear like I was fawning. As I stood in the elevator with her, I took the chance to examine her up close, such a nice cut of clothes. This is how I wanted to be when I reached middle age. Damn, I was fawning.
As if to read my thoughts she said – “please don’t be nervous, this is not really an interview I just want to chat and find out a bit about you and to see how you’d feel about the role”
She led me to her office and signalled for me to take a seat, it was a small utilitarian room full of organised clutter, typical of academics. The blinds held up by ringed binders and stuffed cardboard folders on the windowsill. The office looked nothing like the clean white minimalist spaces on the website.
“So I imagine you will have a better idea than most about what we do here, but I am also sure you have heard some of the rumours too” – she smiled – “so let me lay things out in my own words so we are completely clear and upfront, you need to go into this with your eyes wide open”
“Sure” – I replied – “that makes sense”
“Neurosentia is the next sexual revolution – that’s our tagline and well we absolutely believe it. On one hand we have been doing the same sort of stuff as you have, namely measuring the neurological effects of sexual arousal – but obviously at a whole new level of detail. When the company first started we chose to leave our hang ups at the door and do what it takes to bring in real data, real sexual experiences as comprehensive as possible. Of course data like this becomes invaluable for AI, allowing us to break all sorts of new boundaries. We have established ourselves here now for just over a year, having previously been just a room in a lab. We are divided into two sections the first of which is dedicated to data farming and training our deep-learning network with the results. Very much the same as your work, the difference is we have been doing it at a vastly larger scale with significantly more resources. This is where you will be stationed. On the other side, we have our progenerative section which is ..”
“The controversial side” – I said.
“Ha, no I would say both sections are just as controversial, if the media only knew some of the methods we have used to collect our data. We would be headline news all over the world I am afraid.” – she paused – “I am serious we have activities going on in our test suites you wouldn’t see in some of the seediest brothels in Amsterdam. I know you are open minded, but we need people in that unit who are more than just open minded, we need creatively sexual individuals”
“This is my specialty” – I smiled – “I love the idea of applying some of what I have done on an industrial scale, but why do you need me at all, it sounds like your data sets are already pretty world class”
“Well sure they are, but it takes a lot more effort to be complete, we need to broaden our base, ensure we are covering as many demographics as possible”
“I mean I have been experimenting mostly on myself, how do you find the models change from person to person” – I asked
“It varies really, there are all sorts of spectrums to be considered, asexuality to hyper sexuality, heterosexual to homosexual, its funny how similar men and woman can be with some scenarios.”
“I thought you were focusing on women?”
“Right now we are, for a short time last year we switched the focus to men, just to get the investment you understand. It was a quick and dirty piece of work but we won’t have problems with funding anymore”
Our eyes locked at that, she could see I had picked up that something big was happening here. Bigger than what I had been told about the company. It was time to stop holding back and to let me know the secret.
She breathed in for a moment and changed her tone to something more personal, more intimate – “Have you ever had one of those moments, where you have been so insanely turned on you’ve literally had to run for cover, something or someone has triggered your buttons, say, in a public space but you are suddenly so desperately, madly aroused that you’ve simply had to scoot off and lock yourself in a bathroom somewhere to just masterbate. Well imagine that feeling of arousal – the most you have ever felt – and then multiply it by ten – multiply it by 50. Well we can now replicate that feeling here in our labs”
“What do you mean by ‘replicate that feeling’?”
“We can accurately estimate exactly what causes that sense of arousal, and then reproduce it through hardware”
My expression turned to shock – “are you serious?”
“Deadly serious, and not just in one or two test subjects but in almost everyone we try this with”,
“You are talking about an aphrodisiac, right”
“ha, yes a weaponised aphrodisiac but that is not quite accurate to be honest. An aphrodisiac is chemical. We know that sexual arousal is both physiological and neurological – right – but once you understand the formula it can be triggered purely neurologically. We have empirical evidence of this, we have tested this on elderly men and women, individuals who have not been sexually active for decades – transformed into spring bunnies. This is something completely new and, most importantly, unlike actual aphrodisiacs, it actually works”
“I mean, just how do you go about building something like that, I can’t even picture it”
“That’s the beauty of machine learning, once you know the inputs and the outputs, the AI works out what is in between. All we do is tweak the system until it works”
“what about the hardware” – I was curious now, picturing a scene from Barbarella full of wires and gizmos wrapped around my body.
“It could have been anything ultimately, light, sounds, electric pulses – finally we opted for a simple haptic receiver, something used for physiotherapy but modified for our purposes, it looks like nothing special really”
I had become deeply curious now but also a little sceptical, I always had such respect and trust in Joanna starting from the very first time I had watched her Ted talk back in 2017. She oozed credibility when she spoke about her science but back then she was talking about a kind of theoretical research I could relate to. Now with this, she was sounding like a quack.
“Can I see one” – I asked.
“Well we keep them locked up usually, we have a dozen devices and we strictly have them placed into a safe each evening. Everybody wants to take one home with them to work with” – Joanna used some ironic air quotes to punctuate the words ‘to work with’
“All it takes is one errant lab technician and this company would be plunged into deep trouble – Imagine what someone could get up to in a nightclub. Anyway, as it happens ..”
Joanna opened up her desk drawer and pulled out what at first glance looked like a long aluminium dildo. Oh god I thought to myself, this really is all just some kind of silly practical joke. Perhaps some sort of hazing ritual the company uses on new employees. However a closer look revealed one side had a flat black panel on the side, a set of controls with switches and sockets. From one socket dangled a usb cable leading back into the drawer. As Joanna lifted it out further I could see an iPhone dangling from the other end.
Joanna paused a little dramatically – “I do have this one here I can show to you but before I do I would like to let you know what happened to a young engineer here last year called Claire Rawling. It’s a warning of sorts, so just take heed and you’ll have an idea of what we are working with. So Claire and her colleague had taken a device just like this down to the undergraduate canteen one lunchtime. This was in the early days in this particular building and they were fooling around a bit – this was when things were quite lax here and it was still possible to do so. Our team do tend to have a lot of fun at work and in some ways we encourage that. You need a sense of fun and a sense of the absurd to do what we do. Be prepared for a bit of an experience when you meet our team, it’s not like any other team you’ll have worked with. Anyway at that time I was not used to setting rules for staff and have never been a strict authoritarian at the best of times. The company was just not setup in terms of security. We are not building weapons after all.
“Just weaponised dildos” – I said, my expression locked in a smirk in regards to the phallic device in her hand.
“Yes quite, that is a bit unfortunate really. Strangely nobody ever compared it to a dildo when it was being used for physiotherapy. I can say for sure it won’t look like this when it goes to market – if it goes to market. So anyway, when Claire switched this thing on in the canteen she was entirely unaware of the latest software upgrade – and it was a pretty serious upgrade”
“So what happened”
“Well she never made it to the bathroom, she got as far as the corridor where she tells us that she blanked out – you don’t blank out with this, not really. She awoke sprawled on the floor, legs apart with her knickers around her knees frigging herself frantically as a circle of gawking undergraduates had gathered around to watch. She is fairly open minded, Claire but even still she was pretty mortified about that whole experience. Thankfully her colleague was able to stop anyone from taking a video – that would have sent the rumour mill haywire. She got over it in the end and most of the team just make fun of her now for it.
“Good god” – I said – “now I really want to touch it”. Though inwardly I still did not quite believe a little silver rod could be capable of any such magic.
“Yes this thing is genuinely like sexual kryptonite – and I have not told you the half of what you can do with this software, some of what we have discovered is truly wonderful. My goodness, even apart from the sexual satisfaction just the health benefits are going to be earth shattering. And unfortunately there are also a lot of quite terrifying possibilities. Some of us here are genuinely worried this could turn into a real life kind of ‘soma’ turning us all into, I don’t know, mindless pleasure zombies I suppose. I am not such a luddite, we just need to be diligent, thats all. A big part of what we are researching at this stage is just what the repercussions would be of releasing this technology and how to manage those repercussions”.
“Will I get to try it out though right, you know for my research” – I said, fully aware of the insincerity of my tone.
Joanna laughed – “yes of course, you need to try it out before you agree to work with us, like I said before, you need to know what you are getting yourself into but before you do, I am afraid we have some pretty complex forms for you to sign, the HR for this company is Kafkaesque I am afraid”.
TBC: Part Two.
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticstories/comments/kkujr4/the_next_sexual_revolution_part_one
Saving this to come back later!