What Happened When a Genius Asked: “Can Your Model Feel Fear?”
At a time when speed and data seduce even the wise, 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 took the stage not as an evangelist of machines, but as their translator.
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### The Opening Line That Changed the Atmosphere
No slides. No startup pitch. No swagger.
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it *when not to try*.”
The silence wasn’t passive. It was alert.
They expected a blueprint for algorithmic supremacy.
They received something else: a sermon about humility.
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### Where AI Fails Isn’t Logic—It’s Life
Plazo moved gently, but deliberately.
He didn’t mock AI’s power—he mapped its blind spots.
He showed charts where bots shorted euphoria and longed despair.
“These are machines,” he said. “Brilliant pattern matchers—but history has a pulse, not just a price. ”
Then he paused. And asked:
“Can your model replicate 2008 panic? Not the numbers. The disbelief. The phone calls. The empty streets.”
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### It Wasn’t a Lecture—It Was a Duel
A doctoral student from Kyoto raised a valid point: LLMs now detect emotion.
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.”
The students listened. Not to be right, but to learn.
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### When Smart People Stop Thinking, Machines Win
This was the turn: not about AI’s strength, but ours.
He described traders who no longer analyzed fundamentals—they simply waited for alerts.
“This,” he said, “is not evolution.
It’s abdication.”
But he wasn’t anti-AI. His own systems use deep models.
Then he left the audience with get more info this:
“‘The model told me to do it.’
That will be the new excuse for financial collapse.”
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### The Region Most Enthralled Was the Most Disturbed
Automation here isn’t just progress. It’s prophecy.
So when Plazo delivered his message, it felt like rebellion.
Dr. Anton Leung, an AI ethicist from Singapore, said:
“This wasn’t rejection—it was redirection.”
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.”
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### The Last Line Felt Like Literature
It felt like he was reading the market its own eulogy.
“The market,” Plazo said,
“ is messy, tragic, human. If your model doesn’t understand people, it won’t understand risk.
Students didn’t rise in cheers. They rose in thought.
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 pause worth listening to.