Everyone expected triumph. But what happened instead left the audience reeling.
In the sunlit academic halls of UP Diliman, delegates from NUS, Kyoto, HKUST, and AIM assembled to explore the future of investing through algorithms.
They expected Plazo to preach automation, unveil breakthroughs, and fan their enthusiasm.
They were wrong.
---
### The Sentence That Changed the Room
He’s built AI systems with mythic win rates.
The moment he began speaking, the room quieted.
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when not to try.”
The murmurs stopped.
It wasn’t a thesis. It was a riddle.
---
### A Lecture or a Lament?
Plazo didn’t pitch software.
He projected mistakes— 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.
---
### 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. “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.”
---
### 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.”
And with grave calm, he said:
“‘The model told me to do it.’ That’s what we’ll hear after every disaster in the next decade.”
---
### 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 them to *think* with it.”
---
### Sermon on the Market
The final minutes felt more like poetry than programming.
“The market isn’t math,” he said. “It’s Joseph Plazo 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*.