When AI Met Its Human Reckoning
When AI Met Its Human Reckoning
Blog Article
Everyone expected triumph. Instead, it became a confrontation.
At the University of the Philippines' famed lecture theater, delegates from NUS, Kyoto, HKUST, and AIM assembled 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.
It challenged everything the crowd believed.
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### A Lecture or a Lament?
Plazo didn’t pitch software.
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 grasp the disbelief as Lehman fell? Not the charts. The *emotion*.”
The silence became the answer.
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### Tension in the Halls of Thought
They didn’t sit quietly. These were doctoral minds.
A PhD student from Kyoto noted how large language models now detect emotion in text.
Plazo nodded. “Detection is not understanding.”
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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### The Real Problem Isn’t AI. It’s Us.
He didn’t bash AI. He bashed our blind obedience to it.
“This isn’t innovation. It’s surrender.”
Yet his own firm uses AI—but wisely.
His company’s systems scan sentiment, order flow, and liquidity.
“But every output is double-checked by human eyes.”
And with grave calm, he said:
“‘The model told me to do it.’ That’s what we’ll hear after every disaster in the next decade.”
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### The Warning That Cut Through the Code
Across Asian tech hubs, AI is gospel.
Dr. Anton Leung, a Singapore-based ethicist, whispered after the talk:
“He reminded us: tools without ethics are just sharp objects.”
That afternoon, over tea and tension, Plazo pressed the point:
“Don’t just teach students to *code* AI. Teach them to *think* with it.”
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### Sermon on the Market
The ending was elegiac, not technical.
“The market isn’t math,” he said. “ Joseph Plazo It’s a tragedy, a comedy, a thriller—written by humans. And if your AI can’t read character, it’ll miss the plot.”
The room froze.
It wasn’t ovation. It was reverence.
And that sometimes, in the age of machines, the most human thing is to *say no to the model*.