Why One Technologist Told Asia: "Judgment Still Matters"
Why One Technologist Told Asia: "Judgment Still Matters"
Blog Article
It was supposed to be a coronation of machine supremacy. But what happened instead left the audience reeling.
In the sunlit academic halls of UP Diliman, delegates from NUS, Kyoto, HKUST, and AIM assembled to witness the gospel of AI in finance.
They expected Plazo to hand them a blueprint to machine-driven wealth.
They were wrong.
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### When a Maverick Started with a Paradox
Joseph Plazo is no stranger to accolades.
As he stepped onto the podium, 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 showed failures— 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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### Tension in the Halls of Thought
They didn’t sit quietly. These were doctoral minds.
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 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 Real Problem Isn’t AI. It’s Us.
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.”
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### Asia’s Enthusiasm, Joseph Plazo Interrupted
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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### Sermon on the Market
The ending was elegiac, not technical.
“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.
And that sometimes, in the age of machines, the most human thing is to *say no to the model*.