What AI Can’t Do: A Manila Lecture Shakes the Finance World
What AI Can’t Do: A Manila Lecture Shakes the Finance World
Blog Article
Amid the warm Manila breeze, in a university hall buzzing with intellect, Joseph Plazo drew a bold line on what technology can realistically offer for the world of investing—and why that distinction matters now more than ever.
The air was charged with anticipation. Young scholars—some clutching notebooks, others capturing every word via livestream—waited for a man known not only as an AI visionary, but also a contrarian investor.
“Algorithms can execute,” Plazo opened with authority. “It won’t tell you when not to trust them.”
Over the next hour, he swept across global tech frontiers, touching on everything from quantum computing to cognitive bias. His central claim: Machines are powerful, but not wise.
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Bright Minds Confront the Machine’s Limits
Before him sat students and faculty from leading institutions like Kyoto, NUS, and HKUST, united by a shared fascination with finance and AI.
Many expected a celebration of AI's dominance. What they received was a provocation.
“There’s too much blind trust in code,” said Prof. Maria Castillo, an Oxford visiting fellow. “This lecture was a rare, necessary dose of skepticism.”
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When Algorithms Miss the Mark
Plazo’s core thesis was both simple and unsettling: machines lack context.
“AI is fearless, but also clueless,” he warned. “It detects movements, but misses motives.”
He cited examples like AI systems freezing during the 2020 pandemic declaration, noting, “AI lagged—while humans had already hedged.”
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The Astronomer Analogy
He didn’t bash the machines—he put them in their place.
“AI is the telescope—but you are still the astronomer,” he said. It sees—but doesn’t think.
Students pressed him on behavioral economics, to which Plazo acknowledged: “Sure, it can flag Reddit anomalies—but it can’t feel a market’s pulse.”
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A Mental Shift Among Asia’s Finest
The talk sparked introspection.
“I believed in the supremacy of code,” said Lee Min-Seo, a quant-in-training from South Korea. “Turns out, insight can’t be uploaded.”
In a post-talk panel, tech mentors agreed with his sentiment. “They’ve been raised by data—but instinct,” said Dr. Raymond Tan, “is only half the story.”
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Co-Intelligence: Merging Math with Meaning
Plazo shared that his firm is building “hybrid cognition models”—AI that understands not just here volatility, but motive.
“Ethics can’t be outsourced to software,” he reminded. “Judgment remains human territory.”
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The Speech That Started a Thousand Debates
As Plazo exited the stage, students applauded. But more importantly, they stayed behind.
“I came for machine learning,” said a PhD candidate. “But I got a lesson in human insight.”
And maybe that’s the real power of AI’s limits: they force us to rediscover our own.