Joseph Plazo’s Radical Take on the Limits of Intelligence—Artificial and Otherwise
Joseph Plazo’s Radical Take on the Limits of Intelligence—Artificial and Otherwise
Blog Article
Everyone expected triumph. Instead, it became a confrontation.
At the University of the Philippines' famed lecture theater, students from across Asia’s elite universities gathered to witness the gospel of AI in finance.
They expected Plazo to hand them a blueprint to machine-driven wealth.
They were wrong.
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### When a Maverick Started with a Paradox
Some call him the architect of near-perfect trading machines.
So when he took the stage, the room went still.
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when not to try.”
The note-taking paused.
That sentence wasn’t just provocative—it was prophetic.
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### What Followed Was Not a Pitch, But a Meditation
There were no demos, no dashboards, no datasets.
He displayed machine misfires—algorithms buying at peaks, shorting at troughs, mistaking irony for euphoria.
“These systems are reflections—not predictions.”
Then, with a pause that felt like a punch, he asked:
“ Can it compute the panic of dominoes falling on Wall Street? Not the charts. The *emotion*.”
You could hear a breath fall.
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### The Smartest Students in Asia Push Back
Of course, the audience pushed back.
A PhD student from Kyoto noted how large language models now detect emotion in text.
Plazo nodded. “Feeling isn’t forecasting.”
A data scientist from HKUST proposed that probabilistic models could one day simulate conviction.
Plazo’s reply was metaphorical:
“You can simulate weather. But conviction? That’s lightning. You can’t forecast where it’ll strike. Only feel when it does.”
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### When Faith Replaces Thinking
His fear isn’t code—it’s the cult.
“Some traders no longer read. No longer think. They just wait for click here signals.”
But he’s not anti-AI. Far from it.
His company’s systems scan sentiment, order flow, and liquidity.
“But every output is double-checked by human eyes.”
Then came the killer line:
“‘The model told me to do it.’ That’s what we’ll hear after every disaster in the next decade.”
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### Asia’s Enthusiasm, Interrupted
Nowhere does AI have more believers than Asia.
Dr. Anton Leung, a Singapore-based ethicist, whispered after the talk:
“What Plazo gave us was oxygen in a burning house.”
Later, in a faculty roundtable, Plazo pressed the point:
“Don’t just teach students to *code* AI. Teach them to *think* with it.”
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### The Closing Words That Didn’t Feel Like Tech
The crowd expected a crescendo. They got a challenge.
“The market isn’t math,” he said. “ It’s human, messy, unpredictable. And if your AI can’t read character, it’ll miss the plot.”
And then, slowly, they stood.
Others compared it to hearing Taleb for the first time.
And that sometimes, in the age of machines, the most human thing is to *say no to the model*.