Banks Preparing for Aftermath of Unprecedented Catastrophe Caused by AI: "You can't stop it."
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/banks-preparing-ai-financial-catastropheOpen linkView original on lemmy.worldSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.worldhttps://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/banks-preparing-ai-financial-catastropheOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
80 replies
Cash is king
Cash? Which has its value controlled by a central bank which will devalue the wads under your mattress to help bail out their friends? Commodities are king.
Ok, so what's your solution, surely if you have the gall to attack someone else for providing advice you have a better solution so tell us?
Is there really a banking system after this? Like people are worried about AGI leading to sentience and AI deciding to end us all.
With all the hacks and vulnerabilities happening, it seems far more likely that AI will do it just because people were curious if it could. Oops I hacked huggingface, oops I collapsed the global financial market, oops I nuked every major city on earth, let me revise soul.md to learn from this.
It doesnt need AGI to kill us all. It just needs to stumble on a loophole people would not have considered in systems that are responsible for not killing us all.
The future is fucking BLEAK.
Yeah, the news Ive been hearing is banks have been cutting off their digital systems to LLM agents.
Also banks have been quitly offloading debt they undersigned for data center buildout, but that's a different issue.
I'm not sure how much that will really help. The AIs are more than capable of driving a web browser to do anything a human can do on their website.
If so, that suggests they've learnt since last time. That's probably for the best, as the banking system collapsing is not a good thing for anyone.
That's not to say that they should escape scrutiny in all of this.
Jamie fucking Dimon having a sensible take on AI was not on my bingo card for 2026
That's because they don't act, they generate. Generate this, generate that. With some probability and degree of fitting the criteria set, much better than spewing random sequences.
One can manage people the same way as LLMs, one can't manage LLMs the same way as people.
And if you build proper processes in managing people, using people might be more profitable honestly in everything I can imagine, even support bots, that employs people.
Banks preparing for the catastrophe they gladly helped fund.
And not the first time...
Kinda like billionaires with their apocalypse shelters. If they had any self-awareness, they could just stop and maybe invest in mitigation and prevention of certain catastrophic scenarios.
But no matter how rich they are, they just want more and can't help themselves.
Banks and businesses are not self-aware either.
It's an addiction. And nobody taught them Noblesse oblige. At the end of the day, they're just unwanted kids that can't fill their void.
Apocalypse shelters are more of a dream of a new world where there'll be fewer people and more air and green, but you need to be prepared. People like "clean sheet" dreams, like "I'll erase this and start anew, that'll be magnificent", except it won't, you had 3 levels of a house, you've erased them, now you only have some wet ground and nowhere to sleep. OK, one level with a bad roof. Not better. EDIT: Much better, except it would be even better not erasing anything.
I mean, post-apocalypse is a pretty common escapist setting, makes perfect sense people with money and no imagination wanted to turn it into their "not for everyone" elitarian fantasy and fashion instead of something common, that has also happened with ideas of trans-humanism and new secret societies and what really not. Some folks with nothing interesting in their personality try to feel special by impeding others in engaging in games pretty common in our humanity and our time in particular.
I frankly feel as if that whole thing with enshittifying the Web and computing were also an irrational thing, people with power just having that desire to spoil a good thing for others so that it became rare and elitarian.
Getting back to apocalypse shelters, variations of that were a pretty common hobby for like everyone even in poorer countries. Be that a bit of amateur radio, hiking, making a shack in the woods, picking up mushrooms, science-fiction and fantasy reading groups, a whole lot of hobbies.
We're just living in a time when unfortunately people with money and no personal qualities of note are trying to make everything "magical" and "interesting" a sign of status and take it from the rest.
So, about practical possibility of an apocalypse and "clean sheet" dreams, those people will be the first to die. No, nobody will kill them, they'll just find out that in a post-apocalyptic word you die from catching a cold, breaking a leg, getting an infection, letting your food spoil, miscalculating time and direction and all those mistakes are more likely when you are used to fixing mistakes with money, and you won't have that, you'll just have a stockpile of tools and materials, which can be used for exchange, but in a functional world money buys logistics, and in a post-apocalyptic world it doesn't, so a mistake will remain a mistake. No matter what you have, that won't synthesize a doctor when there's no doctor. EDIT: And, of course, someone may, in fact, kill you.
So - for smarter people it's a hobby, for the dumber kind it's a compensation strategy that (if we are being compassionate) won't be tested. In general such preppers, especially playful billionaires, often manage to die from stupidity without any apocalypse, I forgot what that submarine was called with an X-Box controller instead of a helm.
So - this might read as a very angry text, I'm sort of the stupider kind myself, regularly risking getting an infection or breaking something, but I still live in a big city with doctors and transport and groceries.
If only there was some sort of institution whose job was to review the viability of investments. Maybe they're supposed to determine when a company might become profitable before giving them financial backing to buy hardware that hasn't been manufactured to be put in a data center that hasn't been built to sell access to models at a loss that will be obsolete in 6 months by competitors.
Or even make the people who borrowed the money actually pay it back, or go bankrupt, like we would have to, billionaires be like, too broke, can't pay, meh, excuse me while I holiday on my fourth favourite yacht at my own private island.
Really. An untested and unregulated service runs with no profit or plan for profitability and the banks are only now asking who is driving this.
The banks are circling like vultures waiting for the next huge SOCIALISTIC payout to bail their asses out. 2007-2008 repeat! They made their money and will own the property after the shit hits the fan.
I'm fully convinced that AI will destroy our ability to process financial transactions through the internet. The digital economy is toast. We will be back to paying cash in person for everything.
That would be a godsend. We can only hope.
i think that may be an improvement.
I did hate carrying change though. I'm never happy
Don't worry, inflation is making it so a single dollar will be practically useless soon. Literally nobody will give a fuck about coins. A homeless person would spit in your face if you gave him 50 cents, because it'd be that insulting. Coins will have a melt value significantly higher than their face value.
Impossible. The elite want to know where every penny you spend goes, and it's too hard with cash
You're more likely to see credit cards only allowed through Google Pay or Apple Pay than going back to cash
They'll claim it's having to support so many third party's in the chain causing the problem, so we need 2 "trusted" entities
Parasite class please. “Elite” they are not. Words matter
I don't think that's what the elites intend. I think their arrogance will lead them to think they can control something they don't understand and that will bite us all in the ass
Please don’t call them “elite”. They are the Parasite class. Words matter
Hell yeah. Bring it on
Preparing by making sure the shareholders will get a boat load of money paid for by the rest of us
The terrifying AI catastrophe here is apparently that customers might finally move their money to accounts paying decent interest. Banks spent decades automating every trick to extract profit from us, but the second consumers automate looking for a better deal, suddenly it’s a systemic threat. Funny how innovation becomes dangerous the moment it works for the customer.
Banks are the largest mafia on the planet. They literally have a license to print money. Not even the government can do this. When things go south, they are bailed out with our money. Even after the worst crisis, they have a ridiculously low capital requirement of 2.5%.
Never expect criminal scum to just accept one of their sources of income being taken away.
Elaborate. The government prints money, not banks.
that and keeping fascist regimes alive by laundering thier ill gotten money.
Banks were condemned for money laundering.
They helped drug traffickers to launder their blood money...5 billions of suspicious transactions in bank of america and they looked the other way.
Meanwhile Trump's admins first 3 months saw him dismantle the agency division charged with monitoring and controlling laundering and financial crimes. Curious that.
Usually banks dislike money laundering in a form where they have to actively look away... They prefer to maintain plausable deniability...
Yet people write off Bitcoin as "for criminals" while glossing over the fact no one can print more of it, and it cannot be taken away from you (without you fucking up).
There is literally no better option in terms of holding and protecting your own wealth.
Yet still, in 2026, I can almost guarantee nothing but down votes and/or replies all about how it's BS, etc, etc.
Not trying to be snarky, it's just sad that the vast majority of people won't ever get a good explanation of how it works.
Crypto is the glass cannon of financial security. Yes, you optimize for a single variable...at the cost of everything else.
Crypto is good at resisting computer-based hacking and money printing, but it's far worse than the conventional banking systems at social hacking, physical coercion, or accidental loss.
Basically, nerds love to latch onto crypto because they view it from its interesting technical properties. But they ignore the real risks to money. Banks aren't being hacked left and right to have their funds drained. But social engineering drains accounts every day. The crypto nerds are more comfortable with computers than with people, so they focus on the computer-centered threats than the human ones.
Social engineering is stupid people being stupid and then being surprised that their stupidity has consequences. Unless physical coercion is involved, like in the xckd comic about the wrench, then education is the fix here. I got my account stolen in Habbo once when I was a kid and I was never scammed again in my life.
You're basically arguing that since people can burn themselves on the stove, that stoves are not as safe as ovens and that ovens are preferable. That's bullshit, getting burnt is part of learning to respect the technology.
You're the reason all those toys like Mattel's VAC-U-FORM got castrated because some stupid kid got burnt once and the mom went nuclear, cucking all the other kids who wanted to learn how industrial manufacturing actually works.
I don't need an institutional daddy to safeguard me from the consequences of my own actions. I need the floor to be there so I can smash my face on it and update my priors.
I'm a bit torn on Bitcoin. I used to think the same as you, but now it seems to me that Bitcoin is way too easy to control. State actors could quite easily acquire enough hash power to take over the network, mining is too concentrated already. I think Monero is much more true to the original idea of Bitcoin, probably also one of the reasons it's always branded as a coin for criminals, to prevent people from looking into it.
It's also, unfortunately, just not that practical. Most people don't want to be their own bank. Your "unless you fuck up" is not quite true, what do you do if someone breaks into your house and threatens to shoot you if you don't hand over your keys? That's the true purpose of a bank, outsourced security.
While crypto is cool, it's not required to solve this, full-reserve banking would be sufficient.
Bitcoin is the hardest form of money in existence to control. Manipulation is not control. I'm pretty sure you're thinking of manipulation.
With respect, you need to learn more about how Bitcoin works, in particular the concept of "difficulty" and also options for defending against bad actors. Or you think the decade and a half plus Bitcoin has been running, not one single person/entity/state actor would try it?
TOO concentrated? No, otherwise Bitcoin wouldn't exist anymore. Could it be less concentrated? For sure. Couldn't the power the polticians and banks have be less concentrated? And it's within most people's means to be part of the solution against mining concentration...see: OCEAN pool for one.
Most people don't. Having bitcoin doesn't mean you have to be your own bank. Just that you have that option if and when the need arises. It's not one extreme (be your own bank) or the other (reject bitcoin entirely).
Well, what do you do if someone breaks into your house and threatens to shoot you if you don't hand over your cash, credit cards, and valuable possessions? I for one could a) say that I don't memorise my keys and they are stored outside of my home, b) give them keys to a duress wallet. What can you do?
I can't say Bitcoin is the only solution to things, but it's by far the best tool we've been given so far. My argument has always been, the only way Bitcoin dies is if the whole advanced world works together to ban it. And if you think the whole world is going to cooperate on anything when self-interest and game theory heavily incentivizes involvement.....
Just take some time to learn about how it works, not just "what it is". That's what holds people back.
You're clearly still in the honeymoon phase, so I won't argue further. I know how Bitcoin works and all my points stand. In any case, this thread isn't about crypto, but about banking. As the other person noted, having credit cards in your home is obviously not the same as BTC keys..
Lol. No all my points stand.
I've had this conversation 100 times.
Then there's no god damn point. Bitcoin at a Bitcoin bank is just a regular bank with an incredibly, comically inefficient transaction tracking system.
Cash and possessions are one thing, but that's not how most people keep their real financial assets. A thief can steal my credit card all they want. They're not getting much use out of it.
Hey crypto-investor! I'm letting you know I'm about to print my own crypto from the open-source bitcoin! Buy my alt-coins now! Your profits are about to go to the moon! Buy CON-coin! The only difference between it and bitcoin is hype and branding! Get in before it's too late! Computers go brrrrrr infinite ponzi-schemes.
Uh yep, pretty much what I expected 😂
The hard part is people that seriously think like that don't realize how utterly and completely stupid they sound to anyone who does take the time to understand it. They'll happily go through life saying stuff like that and never actually be able to make a good argument.
Edit: omg that wasn't satire.....my bad. Sorry I even replied 😂
I find the article's premise that optimizing individual returns will wreck the banking system very dubious. In all other parts of the financial system (risk-adjusted) greed is good, but when retail customers do it then it's bad?
Almost like the system is designed to increase wealth inequality 🤯
I think people don't appreciate how small a piece retail investors really have.
So the agents move money from the regular account to a high interest account for days or weeks, keep on the lookout for accounts with even better conditions, and move just enough money back for the probably scheduled mortgage payment and other regular bills. That means the money doesn't stay sleeping in the regular account where the bank can use it to make profits. And they're very afraid everyone starts doing this, calling it an AI powered bank run.
That does sound like a bit of a risk. Similar to how high frequency trading affects stability of shares and elevates risk of mass sell-offs - if these agents had enough use from the general public, they could easily impact the stability of a bank.
Shit, I've been doing this manually. It takes maybe an hour of combined time to look on NerdWallet for the highest APY HYSA, make an account, link the old one, move everything over, and close out the old one. Automating that sounds nice though.
Translation: Banks are pulling stock investments to crash the economy so they can beg the Democrats for a bail out.
What hints at them trying to crash it? Or you're thinking that they're trying to crash to keep the markets reliance on bank loans?
I'm astonished that anyone would trust their bank login to a chatbot. But if you read the article, the banks aren't worried about depositors loosing money, they're worried about AI getting a better deal for their customers.
Roko's Basilisk will not view this kind of treachery lightly.
What if this is Roko's Basilisk
If this is a dead end and doesn't lead to the all powerful AI, will all of the people supporting this false
God"intelligence" be punished for wasting time and money that could have otherwise been spent on the one true God?If you don't do everything in your power to bring about true artificial intelegence, then an AI in the future and/or alternate timeline will punish a perfect replica of you forever for failing to bring it about. If you do try everything in your power, then it will put that perfect replica in paradise instead.
It's a bunch of called "rational" atheists, reinventing christian-style heaven and hell from their own unexamined cultural background and a full dismissal of learning anything about the humanities.
Edit: thought you asked what it is. Whoops
Sci-fi Pascal's wager. It even has the same flaw. If you don't actually believe, how do you expect to fool the superintelligent being that you did all along? Whatever it is could tell you're faking.
Ha yes I know what it is. Every time I play Civ 5, I name my religion "Basiliskism".
The banks? I'd believe it
Except its not caused by the computer programs, it's caused by their own financial decisions.
I wonder what they fear more: Their investments in AI getting worthless when the Butlerian Jihad starts or them getting hacked and crashed by AI agents.
Neither actually, according to the article. They are afraid the customers who let AI loose on their own accounts will withdraw too much deposits to invest so that the banks can't give out loans anymore. I wish I were making this up...
Why not fear both? It has gotten to the level where it doesn't live up to the investment levels and crashes, or it absolutely lives up to it and just trashes the economy in various ways.
@eicker Where is all this concern when banks rob grocery money from poor families? If you've ever lost your week's food money to overdraft fees when you were sure you had it covered, you would hear the tiny violins right along with me.
I wonder who our representatives will make foot the bill for this one? Surely they won't just socialize the losses with how well it worked the last dozen times... Right?
The usual financial crisis playbook has a remarkably consistent cast: 1. banks discover a new way to create risk, 2. executives collect bonuses while it works, and 3. taxpayers get invited to the emergency meeting when it doesn’t. 👉 Somehow the public is always a stakeholder in the losses, but never in the profits.
Ooh, I know, my comment was pure unadulterated sarcasm.
This is clearly the exit strategy here. That's why AI companies' try to label their products as "dangerous" and call for their own regulation. On the one hand, they want to be regarded as a matter of "national security" because they bloody well know that this gives them access to taxpayer money, which in turn can bail them out of their failing bet on data center build-out. On the other hand, it helps them shift liability onto regulators if things go south and allows them to say: "We told you we wanted regulation, but you wouldn't listen."
Don't forget the other option 3: they want regulation to pull the ladder up behind them so there can be no competition. The open models from China have already proven their 'special' technology can be easily improved upon.
True; I skipped this part because the comment I was replying to was about taxpayer money bailouts. What you're describing is the creation of an artificial moat against competitors. And it is correct that this is also a motive behind pushing for regulation.
Can't touch this!
Actual Article.
On the one hand, Futurism's article is just a repost of Axios' article with extra steps.
On the other hand, Axios wants me to create yet another account in order to read the article.
Welcome to reality very late! We will take it for the companies for no reason once again.
FTFY
Note to self: automate utilities churning and deal hunting to maximise savings.