The Day Asia’s Brightest Minds Were Confronted by a Hard Truth
The Day Asia’s Brightest Minds Were Confronted by a Hard Truth
Blog Article
It was supposed to be a coronation of machine supremacy. What unfolded was a reckoning.
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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### The Opening That Made Them Stop Breathing
He’s built AI systems with mythic win rates.
So when he took the stage, the room settled.
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when not to try.”
The murmurs stopped.
It challenged everything the crowd believed.
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### What Followed Was Not a Pitch, But a Meditation
There were no demos, no dashboards, no datasets.
He displayed machine misfires— 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?
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. “Knowing someone’s angry doesn’t tell you why—or what comes next.”
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.
“People are worshipping outputs like oracles.”
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.”
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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### Why This Message Stung Harder in the East
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 here 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.
He came to remind us: we are still responsible.