Amid the warm Manila breeze, in a university hall buzzing with intellect, tech entrepreneur and investment icon 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.

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, Plazo delivered a fast-paced masterclass, balancing data science with real-world decision making. His central claim: AI is brilliant, but blind.

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Top Students Meet a Tough Truth

Before him sat students and faculty from a multi-nation academic alliance, gathered under a technology consortium.

Many expected a praise-filled keynote of AI's dominance. Plazo had other plans.

“There’s a rising cult of algorithmic faith,” said Prof. Maria Castillo, a respected AI ethicist from the UK. “We need this kind of discomfort in academia.”

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The Machine’s Blindness: Plazo’s Case for Caution

Plazo’s core thesis was both simple and unsettling: AI does not grasp nuance.

“AI won’t flinch, but neither will it foresee,” 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 sentiment tracking, 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 “symbiotic systems”—AI that pairs statistical logic with situational nuance.

“Only you can judge character,” he reminded. “Belief isn’t programmable.”

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The Speech That more info Started a Thousand Debates

As Plazo exited the stage, the crowd rose. But more importantly, they lingered.

“I came for machine learning,” said a PhD candidate. “But I left understanding myself better.”

In knowing what AI can’t do, we sharpen what we can.