The Day the Machines Were Humbled in Asia’s Capital of Thought
The Day the Machines Were Humbled in Asia’s Capital of Thought
Blog Article
It was supposed to be a coronation of machine supremacy. What unfolded was a reckoning.
At the University of the Philippines' famed lecture theater, 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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### The Sentence That Changed the Room
Joseph Plazo is no stranger to accolades.
As he stepped onto the podium, the room quieted.
“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
There were no demos, no dashboards, no datasets.
He showed failures— 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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### But What About Conviction?
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
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 website 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 crowd expected a crescendo. They got a challenge.
“The market isn’t math,” he said. “ It’s human, messy, unpredictable. And if your AI can’t read character, it’ll miss the plot.”
And then, slowly, they stood.
Some said it reminded them of Jobs at Stanford.
He came to remind us: we are still responsible.