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
The scene was set for celebration. What unfolded was a reckoning.
At the University of the Philippines' famed lecture theater, students from across Asia’s elite universities gathered 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
He’s built AI systems with mythic win rates.
The moment he began speaking, the room settled.
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when not to try.”
The murmurs stopped.
It challenged everything the crowd believed.
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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— bots confused by sarcasm, making billion-dollar errors in milliseconds.
“Most AI is trained on yesterday. Investing happens tomorrow.”
Then, with a pause that felt like a punch, he asked:
“Can your AI feel the fear of 2008? Not the charts. The *emotion*.”
You could hear a breath fall.
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### Tension in the Halls of Thought
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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### 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.”
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.”
In a private dialogue among professors, Plazo pressed the point:
“Don’t just teach students to *code* AI. Teach them to *think* with it.”
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### No Clapping. Just Standing.
The final minutes felt more like poetry than programming.
“The market isn’t math,” he said. “ It’s a tragedy, a comedy, a thriller—written by humans. And if your AI can’t read character, it’ll miss the plot.”
No one moved.
Some said it reminded them of Jobs at here Stanford.
He came to remind us: we are still responsible.