Technology

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.

Other finance gurus have pointed to the fact that AI agents might simply go haywire, regardless of what they’ve been instructed to do.

“You’re assuming they’re going to act properly on your behalf and they may not,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told a room full of economists and financial experts in Chicago earlier this month. “You can’t stop it. You just have to, like, manage the hell out of it.”

Jamie fucking Dimon having a sensible take on AI was not on my bingo card for 2026

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.

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.

Banks preparing for the catastrophe they gladly helped fund.

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'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'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.

Mr. Banks declared, "YOU CAN'T STOP IT, THE UNPRECEDENTED CATASTROPHE CAUSED BY THE AIS, THEY ARE COMING FOR ALL OF US!!"

Translation: Banks are pulling stock investments to crash the economy so they can beg the Democrats for a bail out.

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?

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.

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.

Roko's Basilisk will not view this kind of treachery lightly.

Can't touch this!

Welcome to reality very late! We will take it for the companies for no reason once again.

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.