The mood was electric, the room expectant.
Within UP’s hallowed halls in Manila, a collection of future technocrats and quant prodigies 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.
There were no metrics to gawk at. No buzzwords to tweet.
Just a line—spoken softly, but it detonated:
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when to stop.”
The audience froze.
Because in that single sentence, he inverted their expectations.
They sought mastery. He introduced humility.
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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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### The Clash Between Confidence and Conviction
They questioned him. Sharply.
A student from HKUST offered probabilistic reasoning combined with real-time data as the future of conviction.
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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### The Real Threat Isn’t AI. It’s Obedience.
His speech turned darker.
Plazo described a trader who used to study market structure.
Now? “He just waits for the signal.”
“This isn’t evolution,” he said.
“It’s abdication.”
But he wasn’t rejecting AI. Far from it.
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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### Automation’s Temple, Shaken
In Asia, automation is scripture.
Dr. Anton Leung from Singapore, a leading voice in AI ethics, whispered during the break:
“He didn’t just speak about models. He questioned our moral alignment.”
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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### No One Expected It to End Like a Sermon
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, click here and sudden reversals.
And if your AI doesn’t read character, it won’t understand the story.”
Applause didn’t rush in. Silence did.
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,
he gave back their minds—and maybe their future.