The Talk That Redefined AI’s Role in Finance
The Talk That Redefined AI’s Role in Finance
Blog Article
At a time when AI is deified, one man stood before the next generation of leaders and said:
“Think again.”
Joseph Plazo, the financial world’s AI wunderkind, walked into a grand hall at the University of the Philippines —not to celebrate AI,
but to remind them of its limits.
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### Not an Invention Demo—A Philosophy Class
No techno-glory.
Instead, Plazo opened with a line that sliced through the auditorium:
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it *not* to try every time.”
Notebooks stopped scribbling.
What came next felt more like Plato than Python.
He showed where AI had failed spectacularly: bots buying into collapse, selling into rallies, misreading sarcasm as bullishness.
“ AI is trained on yesterday’s logic. But investing… is about tomorrow.”
Then, with a silence that stretched the moment:
“Can your machine understand the *panic* of 2008? Not the numbers. The *collapse of trust*. The *emotional contagion*.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a challenge.
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### The Most Polite Battle of Wits in AI History
Of course, they pushed back.
A student from Kyoto said that sentiment-aware LLMs were improving.
Plazo nodded. “Yes. But knowing *that* someone’s angry is not the same as knowing *why*—or what they’ll do with it.”
Another scholar from HKUST proposed combining live news with probabilistic modeling to simulate conviction.
Plazo smiled. “You can model rain. But conviction? That’s thunder. You feel it before it arrives.”
There was laughter. Then silence. Then understanding.
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### Tools Aren’t Threats, But Addiction Is
Then came the turn.
He got serious.
“The greatest threat in the next 10 more info years,” he said,
“isn’t bad AI. It’s good AI—used badly.”
He called it: a new priesthood, worshipping the oracle of code.
“This is not intelligence,” he said. “This is surrender.”
Yet he made one thing clear:
His company runs AI. Complex. Layered. Predictive.
“But the final call is always human.”
Then he dropped the line that echoed across corridors:
“‘The model told me to do it’—that’s how the next crash will be explained.”
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### When Faith in Tech Was Shaken
Here, technology is gospel.
Dr. Anton Leung, a noted ethics scholar from Singapore, whispered after:
“It wasn’t a speech. It was a mirror. And not everyone liked what they saw.”
In a roundtable afterward, Plazo gave one more challenge:
“Don’t just teach them to program. Teach them to discern.
To think with AI. Not just through it.”
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### No Product, Just Perspective
There was just stillness.
“The market,” Plazo said, “isn’t code. It’s character.
And if your AI can’t read character, it trades on noise. Not narrative.”
It wasn’t inspiration. It was realization.
One whispered: “We came expecting code. We left with conscience.”
Plazo didn’t sell AI.
He warned about its worship.
And maybe, just maybe, he saved some from a future of blindly following machines that forgot how to *feel*.