What Happened When a Genius Asked: “Can Your Model Feel Fear?”
What Happened When a Genius Asked: “Can Your Model Feel Fear?”
Blog Article
While the world leans harder on algorithms, a single keynote cut through the noise like thunder in a glass dome.
Before rows of scholars flown in from across Asia—NUS, Kyoto, HKUST, AIM— Joseph Plazo addressed the room not as a prophet of AI, but as its conscience.
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### A Beginning Like a Whispered Warning
He didn’t offer promises. He offered paradox.
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it *when not to try*.”
The silence wasn’t passive. It was alert.
They expected a blueprint for algorithmic supremacy.
They received something else: a sermon about humility.
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### Where AI Fails Isn’t Logic—It’s Life
Plazo moved gently, but deliberately.
He didn’t mock AI’s power—he mapped its blind spots.
He showed charts where bots shorted euphoria and longed despair.
“These are machines,” he said. “Brilliant pattern matchers—but history has a pulse, not just a price. ”
Then he paused. And asked:
“Can your model replicate 2008 panic? Not the numbers. The disbelief. The phone calls. The empty streets.”
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### Sharp Minds, Sharper Questions
A doctoral student from Kyoto raised a valid point: LLMs now detect emotion.
Plazo nodded. “ Identifying anger isn’t the same as knowing what someone will do in rage.”
Then he added:
“You can map the weather.
But you still don’t know when lightning strikes.”
Even those who disagreed… paused.
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### Obedience to AI Is Not Intelligence
That’s when his warning turned sharp.
He described traders who believed charts more than their own convictions.
“This,” he said, “is not evolution.
It’s abdication.”
But he wasn’t anti-AI. His own systems use deep models.
Then he left the audience with this:
“‘The model told me to do it.’
That will be the new excuse for financial collapse.”
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### Asia’s Love Affair With AI—Interrupted
Automation here isn’t just progress. It’s prophecy.
So when Plazo delivered his message, it felt like rebellion.
Dr. Anton Leung, an AI ethicist from Singapore, said:
“This wasn’t rejection—it was redirection.”
At a closed-door session later, Plazo was asked how to teach AI better.
His reply?
“Teach people how to challenge the model,
not just how to build it.”
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### The Last Line Felt Like Literature
It felt like he was reading the market its own eulogy.
“The market,” Plazo said,
“isn’t a math problem. It’s a novel. And your AI?
If it can’t read character, it’ll miss the plot.”
Students didn’t rise in cheers. They rose in thought.
Joseph Plazo didn’t sell AI that day.
He gave it soul.
And for a generation raised on speed, he offered the rarest gift here of all:
a moment of doubt worth trusting.