The mood was electric, the room expectant.

At the University of the Philippines’ grand auditorium, a collection of future technocrats and quant prodigies were eager to witness Joseph Plazo unleash the future.

But that’s not what they got.

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### The Codebreaker Who Broke the Narrative

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.

---

### 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 machines shorting during rebounds

“Markets evolve. But your AI is still asking what happened *last week*.”

Then came his challenge:
“Can your model understand the fear of 2008? Not the red charts. The pit in your stomach.”

---

### They Fought Back—And He Smiled

They questioned him. Sharply.

One researcher from NUS mentioned LLMs adapting in real time.

Plazo listened. Then countered.

“Knowing someone is angry doesn’t tell you what click here 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.”

---

### When Faith in Tech Becomes Fanaticism

The lights didn’t dim—but the tone did.
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.”

Yet he clarified: he didn’t fear machines. He feared what we’d become because of them.

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

Asia worships speed. Efficiency. Scale.

Dr. Anton Leung from Singapore, a leading voice in AI ethics, whispered during the break:
“This wasn’t technical. It was spiritual.”

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, and sudden reversals.
And if your AI doesn’t read character, it won’t understand the story.”

The crowd didn’t cheer. They *absorbed*.

Some said it wasn’t a lecture at all. It was prophecy.

For those who came to worship at the altar of the machine,
Plazo offered a blessing—and a warning.