The Moment the Machines Were Told: Not So Fast
The Moment the Machines Were Told: Not So Fast
Blog Article
While algorithms dictate market moves, one man stood before the next generation of leaders and said:
“Think again.”
Joseph Plazo, the financial world’s AI wunderkind, walked into a grand hall at the University of the Philippines —not to celebrate AI,
but to show its cracks.
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### The Unexpected Sermon from an Algorithmic Prophet
No graphs.
Instead, Plazo opened with a line that sliced through the auditorium:
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it *not* to try every time.”
Eyebrows raised.
The next hour peeled away layers of false security.
He illustrated algorithmic mistakes—buying crashes, shorting recoveries, mistaking memes for sentiment.
“ AI is trained on yesterday’s logic. But investing… is about tomorrow.”
Then, with a silence that stretched the moment:
“Can your machine understand the *panic* of 2008? Not the numbers. The *collapse of trust*. The *emotional contagion*.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a challenge.
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### Clash of Titans: Students vs. the Machine-Maker
The students didn’t stay quiet.
A student from Kyoto said that sentiment-aware LLMs were improving.
Plazo nodded. “Yes. But knowing *that* someone’s angry is not the same as knowing *why*—or what they’ll do with it.”
Another scholar from HKUST proposed combining live news with probabilistic modeling to simulate conviction.
Plazo smiled. “You can model rain. But conviction? That’s thunder. You feel it before it arrives.”
There was laughter. Then silence. Then understanding.
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### The Trap Isn’t the Algorithm—It’s Abdication
And then—he pivoted.
He leveled with them.
“The greatest threat in the next 10 years,” he said,
“isn’t bad AI. It’s good AI—used badly.”
He described traders who no longer study markets—only outputs.
“This is not intelligence,” he said. “This is surrender.”
But Plazo was no luddite.
His company runs AI. Complex. Layered. Predictive.
“But the final call is always get more info human.”
Then he dropped the line that echoed across corridors:
“‘The model told me to do it’—that’s how the next crash will be explained.”
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### Why This Hurt More in Asia
In Asia, AI is more than a tool—it’s a dream.
Dr. Anton Leung, a noted ethics scholar from Singapore, whispered after:
“This wasn’t tech criticism. It was a spiritual recalibration.”
In a roundtable afterward, Plazo gave one more challenge:
“Don’t just teach them to program. Teach them to discern.
To think with AI. Not just through it.”
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### No Product, Just Perspective
There were no claps at first.
“The market,” Plazo said, “isn’t an equation. It’s a story.
And if your AI can’t read character, it doesn’t know the ending.”
Students didn’t cheer. They stood. Slowly.
One whispered: “We came expecting code. We left with conscience.”
Plazo didn’t sell AI.
He warned about its worship.
And maybe, just maybe, he saved some from a future of blindly following machines that forgot how to *feel*.