Page 83 of Ideal Life

The mood was lively, though, because if you got a bunch of tech nerds together and encouraged them to talk about their hopes and dreams for what they could build together, it was like Christmas Day, Silicon Valley–style.

Ostensibly, Talia was camped out with her laptop on the third floor in case anyone had questions for her. But the real reason was she hoped she would overhear something from the Omni team that would prove her fears and suspicions wrong.

Especially since she had failed to win the top prize at the Summer Million. Sure, she had the investments she’d made recently, but that was only $20,000 (after the poker buy-in). It was a lot to her, personally, but nowhere near enough to pay the termination fee to end the deal with Omni.

Two of Omni’s engineers, Sheila Jiménez and Lucas Williams, sat at the desk closest to Talia, where they were looking at product schematics.

“So, the Temple Dots,” Sheila said. “Is skin contact necessary, or do you think it would be possible to measure brain activity remotely?”

“Not from super far,” Lucas added. “But yeah, could we do it remotely?”

Yan Kristiansen, Ideal Life’s head of engineering, nodded. “I think I understand. You’re wondering if we need the Temple Dots, or if we can eliminate an extra accessory and roll all of the Temple Dots’ technology into Omni 3Ds, which you think is the future—no one’s going to be using phones or earbuds in a few years. Like, if we could put the sensors into the arms of the glasses, close to the customer’s temples but not touching them.”

“Precisely,” Sheila said, grinning. “The goal is always less friction for the consumer. We want to make it as easy as possible for them to use our entire suite of Omni products. If we can get rid of Temple Dots, that’s one less thing they have to deal with or remember.”

“Well,” Yan said, “as of right now, the Temple Dots do require direct contact to the skin in order to pick up on brain signals. But I can envision a near future where we can engineer that away, especially with the financial resources that Omni has at its disposal.”

“Maybe this is a crazy idea,” Lucas said, “but what about… Nah, never mind.”

Yan leaned forward on the edge of his seat. “Tell us. No ideas are bad ideas in brainstorming, you know.”

Lucas laughed. “Yeah, you’re right. Okay, what about the reverse of what we were just talking about? What if someday we could actually get rid of our glasses and put all of it into Temple Dots? Not only brain-activity sensors, but all of the functionality that currently has to sit inside the Omni 3D hardware.”

Sheila’s jaw dropped open. “Oooh, yes! No need to wear glasses. Everything would be available in two unobtrusive stickers on your head… I love it. Talk about visualizing success!”

The three of them laughed at her pun.

Talia was thinking about what they’d said, though.

But all this was just fantasy for the engineers. It wasn’t evidence that Omni had an evil grand plan to unite Ideal Life’s technology with CerebraLink. Talia slipped away to walk around the third floor to see what other due diligence conversations were going on.

There was one about open-source software.

A debate over how best to integrate Ideal Life’s suggestions into Omni’s many notifications on their social media platforms and chat applications.

A tangential—mostly irrelevant—discussion of living in a virtual augmented reality world.

Then Talia slipped into one of the conference rooms, which several Omni and Ideal Life engineers, including Jody and Jonathan, had taken over to talk about the guts of the Ideal Life AI system. Their laptops and papers littered the long glass table.

“How much effort would it take to change that?” one of the Omni guys asked.

“I mean, we’d basically have to retrain the whole system,” Jody said.

“How long would it take?”

“Depends on how much compute you have,” Jody said.

Talia sat down in a chair near the conference room door. “What are you discussing?”

Jonathan said, “We were talking about how we trained our underlying AI with a base principle that all suggestions had to be for the good of humanity overall. Of course, they also have to be beneficial to the individual customer. But any recommendations that are likely to be good for just one person but at the detriment of society in general would be suppressed.”

Talia nodded. “That was part of our founding mission—to make life better for everyone. It was tricky to align our AI systems to something that was, by definition, subjective, but Jody and Jonathan did a superb job. Like, if customer A is feeling a little down and needs to be entertained, and his profile says that going fast often lifts his spirits, Ideal Life still isn’t going to suggest that customer A race his car down the freeway at a hundred miles an hour. That might improve his life temporarily, but it obviously comes with societal risks.”

“Sure, of course,” the Omni engineer said. “Oh, I’m Mike, by the way. And this is Bonnie, Phil, and Marya. It’s an honor to meet you, Talia. But getting back to the discussion, what we’re trying to figure out is if we can make adjustments to the Ideal Life AI without having to rebuild it from scratch. Not for telling customer A to speed illegally, but for more innocuous things—like can Ideal Life read a dip in blood sugar and then recommend a suggested product from one of our partners?”

Talia froze in her seat.

Jonathan frowned. “Are you saying integrate advertising into suggestions?”