In a packed amphitheater at the University of the Philippines, tech entrepreneur and investment icon Joseph Plazo made a striking distinction on what AI can and cannot achieve for the future of finance—and why that distinction matters now more than ever.

You could feel the electricity in the crowd. Students—some furiously taking notes, others streaming the moment live—waited for a man revered for blending code with contrarianism.

“AI will make trades for you,” he said with gravity. “But it won’t teach you why to believe in them.”

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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Bright Minds Confront the Machine’s Limits

Before him sat students and faculty from prestigious universities across Asia, assembled under a pan-Asian finance forum.

Many expected a victory lap 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 doesn’t panic—but it doesn’t anticipate,” he warned. “It finds trends, but not here intentions.”

He cited examples like machine-driven funds failing to respond to COVID news, noting, “By the time the algorithms adjusted, the humans were already positioned.”

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The Astronomer Analogy

He didn’t bash the machines—he put them in their place.

“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 thought AI could replace intuition,” said Lee Min-Seo, a quant-in-training from South Korea. “Now I see it’s judgment, not just data, that matters.”

In a post-talk panel, tech mentors agreed with his sentiment. “They’ve been raised by data—but instinct,” said Dr. Raymond Tan, “doesn’t replace perspective.”

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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.

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

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The Speech That 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 got a lesson in human insight.”

And maybe that’s the real power of AI’s limits: they force us to rediscover our own.