Motivation

While I was attending a lecture in the digital communications course, our teacher was explaining signal quantization. Basically, after you sample the analog signal, you need to map values to a finite set of values. For example, a value of 1.39 would be mapped to 1.375. This set of finite values would then be decoded and sent.

One colleague asked, but wouldn’t this approximation make us lose valuable information? The teacher replied with a simple question: how old are you? Surprised, our colleague said 20 years old. Are you exactly 20 years old? Aren’t you 20 years old and a couple of months, days, and hours? We all use approximation in our daily lives more than you think, because this still keeps the information we need, came the reply from our teacher.

Are we over-optimizing everything?

  • You want to apply for a job, so you start preparing a CV and motivation letter. After you finish, you send it to ChatGPT or Gemini for review, and they start adding a bunch of comments: you shouldn’t use this expression, it gives the impression that you’re not senior enough, use this verb, it makes you sound more professional, or something like mentioning that you did this doesn’t add anything, delete it, or here you used the present tense, use the past tense because… You finish all of these changes, then submit a perfectly tailored CV and motivation letter for the position (90% of it is just lies), and you end up with a perfectly optimized auto-reply starting with unfortunately.

  • You go on to post something on LinkedIn. You finish writing, then before you post it, you get this Improve with AI feature.

  • You open some dating app, and you are required to make a perfect profile, use very selective lies in your bio, add perfectly captured photos, and write a very careful first message, as if you are stepping on a land mine and any wrong step would make you lose your life.

  • You want to write an email, so you go and ask ChatGPT to craft the email for you, after sending it you would also receive an email generated by AI.

  • Even after finishing this blog, I would ask ChatGPT to review typos and grammatical mistakes, because it would be a disaster if I wrote loose or lose.

Why are we getting obsessed with making everything we do 100% perfect, correct, and optimized? Is this the kind of life we need to live? Why are we turning ourselves into robots? What’s happening to humanity? We have already seen that we use approximation in our daily lives more than what we think, so we would we try to be perfect and eliminate the quantization error?

Are we losing emotions and human interaction?

I was recently reading 1984 by George Orwell. One goal of the party was to make humans lose emotions; it’s forbidden to love or to show compassion. I was wondering, aren’t we right now on track to do this? If you walk down the street and smile at a stranger, you would probably get weird looks. If it was a child, then expect to be called a pedophile, or maybe someone would start arguing aggressively with you.

I was once watching a video about a tennis player who accidentally hit a young girl with the ball. He went on to apologize to her and hugged her; everything was kind, simple, and normal. When I checked the comments, I felt really sad about it. Many people were calling him a pedo because of the hug! I mean, when did an innocent hug become a bad gesture? Wasn’t a hug supposed to be a love language?

I get it that there are some examples out there of bad people, but is this the world that we want to live in?!

Conclusion

This is the first blog I have written of this kind. It’s just about some random thoughts that I had recently. I would probably write more thoughts like this; I’ve found it really nice to write about. Stay tuned for more! 😃