It was supposed to be a coronation of machine supremacy. But what happened instead left the audience reeling.

MANILA — At the heart of the Philippines’ premier university, Asia’s brightest students—engineers, economists, AI researchers—converged to see the future of trading laid bare by machines.

They expected Plazo to preach automation, unveil breakthroughs, and fan their enthusiasm.
Instead, they got silence, contradiction, and truth.

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### The Opening That Made Them Stop Breathing

He’s built AI systems with mythic win rates.

The moment he began speaking, the room settled.

“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when not to try.”

The murmurs stopped.

That sentence wasn’t just provocative—it was prophetic.

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### A Lecture or a Lament?

There were no demos, no dashboards, no datasets.
He showed failures— 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 compute the panic of dominoes falling on Wall Street? Not the charts. The *emotion*.”

The silence became the answer.

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### The Smartest Students in Asia Push Back

Of course, the audience pushed back.

A PhD student from Kyoto noted how large language models now detect emotion in text.

Plazo nodded. “Feeling isn’t forecasting.”

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 Trap Isn’t in the Code—It’s in the Belief

His fear isn’t code—it’s the cult.

“Some traders no longer read. No longer think. They just wait for signals.”

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 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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### Sermon on the Market

The ending was elegiac, not technical.

“The market isn’t math,” he read more said. “ It’s a tragedy, a comedy, a thriller—written by humans. And if your AI can’t read character, it’ll miss the plot.”

No one moved.

Some said it reminded them of Jobs at Stanford.

He came to remind us: we are still responsible.