The Keynote That Shattered AI Myths in Manila
The Keynote That Shattered AI Myths in Manila
Blog Article
It was supposed to be a coronation of machine supremacy. Instead, it became a confrontation.
MANILA — At the heart of the Philippines’ premier university, Asia’s brightest students—engineers, economists, AI researchers—converged to explore the future of investing through algorithms.
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.”
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
There were no demos, no dashboards, no datasets.
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*.”
No one answered. They weren’t supposed to.
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### Tension in the Halls of Thought
They didn’t sit quietly. These were doctoral get more info 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 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.”
Yet his own firm uses AI—but wisely.
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 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.
Others compared it to hearing Taleb for the first time.
He came to remind us: we are still responsible.