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 preparing for the catastrophe they gladly helped fund.
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.
You’re thinking of the Titan Submarine Implosion. Stockton Rush created a submersible to take rich tourists down to see the wreckage of Titanic. He made of carbon fiber, thinking that would be particularly resistant to the crush damage, and ignored experts and warning signs that it was already breaking during test runs.
Behind the Bastards did a two-parter on Stockton Rush that’s worth the time, if you want a deep dive.
And not the first time…
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, the news Ive been hearing is banks have been cutting off their digital systems to LLM agents.
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.
I dunno how they’re detecting agents trying to engage the banking system, only they are, are denying them access and now complaining to the providers about it.
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.
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 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.
i think that may be an improvement.
I did hate carrying change though. I’m never happy
That would be a godsend. We can only hope.
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
Roko’s Basilisk will not view this kind of treachery lightly.
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.
Preparing by making sure the shareholders will get a boat load of money paid for by the rest of us
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mr. Banks declared, “YOU CAN’T STOP IT, THE UNPRECEDENTED CATASTROPHE CAUSED BY THE AIS, THEY ARE COMING FOR ALL OF US!!”
Can’t touch this!
