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. Instead, it became a confrontation.
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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### When a Maverick Started with a Paradox
Some call him the architect of near-perfect trading machines.
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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### A Lecture or a Lament?
Plazo didn’t pitch software.
He projected mistakes—algorithms buying at peaks, shorting at troughs, mistaking irony for euphoria.
“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.
“People are worshipping outputs like oracles.”
Still, he clarified: AI belongs in the cockpit—not in the captain’s seat.
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 more info 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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### The Closing Words That Didn’t Feel Like Tech
The final minutes felt more like poetry than programming.
“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.
Others compared it to hearing Taleb for the first time.
And that sometimes, in the age of machines, the most human thing is to *say no to the model*.