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.
MANILA — At the heart of the Philippines’ premier university, Asia’s brightest students—engineers, economists, AI researchers—converged to see the future of trading laid bare by machines.
They expected Plazo to preach automation, unveil breakthroughs, and fan their enthusiasm.
Instead, they got silence, contradiction, and truth.
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### The Opening That Made Them Stop Breathing
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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### Dismantling the Myth of Machine Supremacy
Plazo didn’t pitch software.
He projected mistakes— neural nets falling apart under real-world pressure.
“Most models,” he said, “are just statistical mirrors of the past.
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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### 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. “Detection is not understanding.”
A data scientist from HKUST proposed more info 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 Trap Isn’t in the Code—It’s in the Belief
His fear isn’t code—it’s the cult.
“Some traders no longer read. No longer think. They just wait for 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.”
He paused, then delivered the future’s scariest phrase:
“‘The model told me to do it.’ That’s what we’ll hear after every disaster in the next decade.”
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### Why This Message Stung Harder in the East
In Asia, automation is often sacred.
Dr. Anton Leung, a Singapore-based ethicist, whispered after the talk:
“This was theology, not technology.”
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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### The Closing Words That Didn’t Feel Like Tech
The final minutes felt more like poetry than programming.
“The market isn’t math,” he said. “It’s a novel. And if your AI can’t read character, it’ll miss the plot.”
The room froze.
It wasn’t ovation. It was reverence.
Plazo didn’t come to praise AI.