The Man Who Told Asia’s Smartest Students: “Think Twice About AI”
The Man Who Told Asia’s Smartest Students: “Think Twice About AI”
Blog Article
It began like a celebration.
Inside the intellectual sanctum of the University of the Philippines, a collection of future technocrats and quant prodigies waited to hear Joseph Plazo’s vision of tomorrow.
But instead, they were handed a reality few had expected.
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### The Opening Shot Was a Whisper of Doubt
Plazo didn’t bring slides.
He didn’t open with results, charts, or jargon.
Just a line—spoken softly, but it detonated:
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when to stop.”
Phones lowered. Pens stilled. Breathing slowed.
Because in that single sentence, he inverted their expectations.
This wasn’t a keynote. It was a mirror.
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### Unmasking the Machine
Plazo went on—not to destroy AI’s promise, but to deflate its mythology.
He shared footage of trading bots gone rogue—
from sentiment models mistaking irony for optimism.
“These systems are echoes, not prophets.
Then came his challenge:
“Can your model understand the fear of 2008? Not the red charts. The pit in your stomach.”
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### They Fought Back—And He Smiled
They questioned him. Sharply.
One researcher from NUS mentioned LLMs adapting in real time.
Plazo listened. Then countered.
“Knowing someone is angry doesn’t tell you what they’ll do with that rage.”
And to the idea of modeled conviction?
“You can code a thunderstorm. But you can’t predict where lightning will strike.
Conviction isn’t data. It’s resolve.”
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### The Cult of the Signal: A New Religion Born on Wall Street
The lights didn’t dim—but the tone did.
Plazo described a trader who used to study market structure.
Now? “He just waits for the signal.”
“This isn’t evolution,” he said.
“It’s abdication.”
Yet he clarified: he didn’t fear machines. He feared what we’d become because of them.
His own firm uses AI—advanced, multi-layered, deep-learning systems.
“But humans still decide when to pull the trigger.”
Then he offered what one professor later called *the line of the decade*:
“‘The model told me to do it’—that’s the next generation’s version of ‘I was just following orders.’”
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### When the Future Blinked
Asia worships speed. Efficiency. Scale.
Dr. Anton Leung from Singapore, a leading voice in AI ethics, whispered during the break:
“He reminded us that precision without perception is dangerous.”
In a quiet faculty roundtable afterward, Plazo reframed AI education:
“Don’t just teach more info how to build the machine.
Teach how to challenge it.”
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### The Final Words Were Not of Code—but Character
His closing wasn’t a pitch. It was a reckoning.
“The market,” he said,
“isn’t an equation. It’s a novel—full of unreliable narrators, chaotic plotlines, and sudden reversals.
And if your AI doesn’t read character, it won’t understand the story.”
No claps followed immediately.
Several faculty members said it reminded them of early Taleb—others said it was Jobs without the swagger.
For those who came to worship at the altar of the machine,
Plazo offered a blessing—and a warning.