The Man Who Asked: “What If AI Isn’t Enough?”
The Man Who Asked: “What If AI Isn’t Enough?”
Blog Article
In an era addicted to acceleration, one voice dared to ask: what gets lost when we stop thinking for ourselves?
At the University of the Philippines, in a hall steeped in tradition and ambition, Joseph Plazo spoke not to impress, but to interrupt.
---
### A Beginning Like a Whispered Warning
He didn’t offer promises. He offered paradox.
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it *when not to try*.”
You could feel it—the inhale of an audience caught off guard.
They expected a blueprint for algorithmic supremacy.
They received something else: a sermon about humility.
---
### The Machines Can’t Smell Smoke
Plazo moved gently, but deliberately.
This wasn’t about errors. It was about context.
He showed charts where bots shorted euphoria and longed despair.
“These are machines,” he said. “ They predict well—until something breaks that was never in their dataset.”
Then he paused. And asked:
“Can your model replicate 2008 panic? Not the numbers. The disbelief. The phone calls. The empty streets.”
---
### When Students Challenged the Master
An HKUST quant suggested multi-source integration could simulate human conviction.
Plazo nodded. “That’s true. But simulation is not sensation. ”
Then he added:
“You can map the weather.
But you still don’t know when lightning strikes.”
There were no rebuttals. Just silence—and respect.
---
### Obedience to AI Is Not Intelligence
That’s when his warning turned sharp.
He described traders who believed charts more than their own convictions.
“This,” he said, “is not evolution.
It’s abdication.”
Yet in his firm, machines *inform*. Humans *decide*.
Then he left the audience with this:
“‘The model told me to do it.’
That will be the new excuse for financial collapse.”
---
### Asia’s Love Affair With AI—Interrupted
In Asia, tech isn’t just a tool—it’s here an ideology.
So when Plazo delivered his message, it landed like a jolt.
Dr. Anton Leung, an AI ethicist from Singapore, said:
“This wasn’t about slowing down tech. It was about remembering what it’s for.”
At a closed-door session later, Plazo was asked how to teach AI better.
His reply?
“Teach people how to challenge the model,
not just how to build it.”
---
### Not a Code Drop—A Curtain Drop
He closed not with a pitch—but a poem in disguise.
“The market,” Plazo said,
“ is messy, tragic, human. If your model doesn’t understand people, it won’t understand risk.
Professors looked at each other—not to clap, but to reflect.
Joseph Plazo didn’t sell AI that day.
He gave it soul.
And for a generation raised on speed, he offered the rarest gift of all:
a moment of doubt worth trusting.