Asia’s brightest gathered for revelation, not resistance.
Within UP’s hallowed halls in Manila, delegates from institutions like NUS, Kyoto, HKUST, and AIM expected another chapter in AI’s victory lap.
But what they received hit harder than any forecast.
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### A Maverick’s First Word Felt Like a Warning Bell
Plazo didn’t bring slides.
He didn’t open with results, charts, or jargon.
Just a line—spoken softly, but it detonated:
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when to stop.”
Phones lowered. Pens stilled. Breathing slowed.
Because in that single sentence, he inverted their expectations.
They had come for acceleration. He offered brakes.
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### He Didn’t Kill the Machine—He Made It Human
Plazo went on—not to destroy AI’s promise, but to deflate its mythology.
He projected reel after reel of AI missteps—
from algorithms buying into black swan crashes
“Most AI is a time machine stuck on yesterday.
Then came his challenge:
“Can your model understand the fear of 2008? Not the red charts. The pit in your stomach.”
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### When Students Challenged the Master
They questioned him. Sharply.
A PhD student from Kyoto rose, citing advances in emotional parsing.
Plazo listened. Then countered.
“Knowing someone is angry doesn’t tell you what they’ll do with that rage.”
And to the idea of modeled conviction?
“You can code a thunderstorm. But you can’t predict where lightning will strike.
Conviction isn’t data. It’s resolve.”
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### When Faith in Tech Becomes Fanaticism
His speech turned darker.
Plazo described a trader who used to study Joseph Plazo market structure.
Now? “He just waits for the signal.”
“This isn’t evolution,” he said.
“It’s abdication.”
Yet he clarified: he didn’t fear machines. He feared what we’d become because of them.
His own firm uses AI—advanced, multi-layered, deep-learning systems.
“But humans still decide when to pull the trigger.”
Then he offered what one professor later called *the line of the decade*:
“‘The model told me to do it’—that’s the next generation’s version of ‘I was just following orders.’”
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### When the Future Blinked
This is where AI is gospel, and Plazo stepped into its cathedral.
Dr. Anton Leung from Singapore, a leading voice in AI ethics, whispered during the break:
“This wasn’t technical. It was spiritual.”
In a quiet faculty roundtable afterward, Plazo reframed AI education:
“Don’t just teach how to build the machine.
Teach how to challenge it.”
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### The Final Words Were Not of Code—but Character
His closing wasn’t a pitch. It was a reckoning.
“The market,” he said,
“isn’t an equation. It’s a novel—full of unreliable narrators, chaotic plotlines, and sudden reversals.
And if your AI doesn’t read character, it won’t understand the story.”
No claps followed immediately.
Several faculty members said it reminded them of early Taleb—others said it was Jobs without the swagger.
For those who came to worship at the altar of the machine,
Plazo offered a blessing—and a warning.