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. But what happened instead left the audience reeling.
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 reaffirm their belief that AI would rule the markets.
Instead, they got silence, contradiction, and truth.
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### When a Maverick Started with a Paradox
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.”
A chill passed through the room.
It wasn’t a thesis. It was a riddle.
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### Dismantling the Myth of Machine Supremacy
Plazo didn’t pitch software.
He projected mistakes—algorithms buying at peaks, shorting at troughs, mistaking irony for euphoria.
“These systems are reflections—not predictions.”
Then, with a pause that felt like a punch, he asked:
“ Can it compute the panic of dominoes falling on Wall Street? Not the charts. The *emotion*.”
You could hear a breath fall.
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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. “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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### When Faith Replaces Thinking
Plazo’s core argument wasn’t that AI is broken. It’s that humans are outsourcing responsibility.
“This isn’t innovation. It’s surrender.”
Still, he clarified: AI belongs in the cockpit—not in the captain’s seat.
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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### The Warning That Cut Through the Code
Nowhere does AI have more believers than Asia.
Dr. Anton Leung, a Singapore-based ethicist, here 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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### Sermon on the Market
The ending was elegiac, not technical.
“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 Stanford.
And that sometimes, in the age of machines, the most human thing is to *say no to the model*.