Intelligence Without Wisdom — Artificial Minds, Financial Systems, and the Regulatory Imagination by José Enrique Pérez is written from “two desks”: the author’s operational role co-founding a regulated Maltese payment institution, and his doctoral research on hybrid AI frameworks for automated decision-making. That dual vantage point — practitioner and researcher — drives the book’s central diagnosis: artificial intelligence in financial services has become extraordinarily intelligent (fast, consistent, pattern-perceiving at scales no human can match) while remaining categorically unwise — incapable of knowing what it doesn’t know, weighing competing institutional obligations, or distinguishing a defensible decision from a right one.