The Limits of Artificial Intelligence
The Limits of Artificial Intelligence
Blog Article
Amid the warm Manila breeze, in a university hall buzzing with intellect, Joseph Plazo laid down the gauntlet on what AI can and cannot achieve for the future of finance—and why understanding this may define who wins in tomorrow’s markets.
You could feel the electricity in the crowd. Students—some furiously taking notes, others capturing every word via livestream—waited for a man revered for blending code with contrarianism.
“Machines will execute trades flawlessly,” he said with gravity. “But understanding the why—that’s still on you.”
Over the next lecture, he swept across global tech frontiers, balancing data science with real-world decision making. His central claim: AI is brilliant, but blind.
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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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Why AI Still Doesn’t Get It
Plazo’s core thesis was both simple and unsettling: code can’t read between the lines.
“AI doesn’t panic—but it doesn’t anticipate,” he warned. “It finds trends, but not intentions.”
He cited examples like machine-driven funds failing to respond to COVID news, noting, here “By the time the algorithms adjusted, the humans were already positioned.”
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The Astronomer Analogy
Rather than dismiss AI, Plazo proposed a partnership.
“AI is the vehicle—but you decide the direction,” 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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The Ripple Effect on a Digital Generation
The talk left a mark.
“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 volatility, but motive.
“Ethics can’t be outsourced to software,” he reminded. “Judgment remains human territory.”
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An Ending That Sparked a Beginning
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.