Joseph Plazo Didn’t Come to Preach Automation. He Came to Warn Us.
Joseph Plazo Didn’t Come to Preach Automation. He Came to Warn Us.
Blog Article
Everyone expected triumph. But what happened instead left the audience reeling.
In the sunlit academic halls of UP Diliman, Asia’s brightest students—engineers, economists, AI researchers—converged to see the future of trading laid bare by machines.
They expected Plazo to reaffirm their belief that AI would rule the markets.
Instead, they got silence, contradiction, and truth.
---
### 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 settled.
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when not to try.”
The murmurs stopped.
That sentence wasn’t just provocative—it was prophetic.
---
### 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 it grasp the disbelief as Lehman fell? Not the charts. The *emotion*.”
No one answered. They weren’t supposed to.
---
### Tension in the Halls of Thought
They didn’t sit quietly. These were doctoral minds.
A PhD student from Joseph Plazo 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.”
---
### The Trap Isn’t in the Code—It’s in the Belief
He didn’t bash AI. He bashed our blind obedience to it.
“This isn’t innovation. It’s surrender.”
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.”
---
### 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.”
Later, in a faculty roundtable, Plazo pressed the point:
“Don’t just teach students to *code* AI. Teach them to *think* with it.”
---
### 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.”
And then, slowly, they stood.
Others compared it to hearing Taleb for the first time.
And that sometimes, in the age of machines, the most human thing is to *say no to the model*.